Machines Reading the Canon: Quayola, from Fresco to Gaudí's Façade

On the nights of 1 and 2 February 2025, more than 110,000 people gathered on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. What they were looking up at was the organic outer wall of Casa Batlló, the World Heritage building designed by Antoni Gaudí. Curved balconies, bone-like window frames, a roof that recalls the back of a dragon — across that surface, which ordinarily stands there like congealed sculpture, countless branches sprouted after dark, grew, and swayed in the wind. The arboreal forms divided as they followed the reliefs and hollows of the building, connected to one another, and made the whole façade look like the system of a single living plant. The work is titled Arborescent. Its author is Quayola, an artist born in Rome and based in London.

Taking the scene of that night as its entry point, this essay attempts to read, on a façade facing the street, the one subject Quayola has pursued consistently for nearly twenty years — making a machine read the canon. At the core of his work lies an operation that has algorithms "look again" at the visual inheritance of humankind: painting, sculpture, architecture. When the result of that rereading rises not inside the walls of a museum but on the outer skin of a building in the city, the screen becomes a tenkei for one night.

Setting a Machine to Read the Canon

Quayola was born in Rome in 1982. He later moved to London, studied digital art at the University of the Arts London, and from around 2006 began making video installations and audiovisual performances. Now based between London and Rome, he has shown work in many parts of the world — at the V&A in London, the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the National Art Center, Tokyo, UCCA in Beijing, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Ars Electronica in Linz.

What consistently characterises his method is taking existing classical works as primary material and passing them through machine vision. The starting point was the Strata series, begun in 2008. In Strata #1, for instance, the subject was the Baroque fresco painted on the ceiling of the Church of the Gesù in Rome. Quayola had an algorithm analyse its composition, its colour and its geometric features, drawing out of the painting's surface, stage by stage, abstract figures that the human eye had not seen. The bodies of saints and angels lose their outlines and are reduced to distributions of colour and patterns of movement. What is generated here is not a "reproduction" of the fresco. It is a different reading, the one that surfaces when a machine looks at the same picture.

This operation stands at the far pole of the subject TENKEI has treated under the category "GA (画)" — the interrogation of the picture plane, the flat surface, visual representation itself. In many cases the screen has been a container for "projecting" something. In Quayola, though, the screen is a site of analysis where classical painting is read again, and the footage it outputs is a record of the visual movement traced by the machine's eye.

The subject of making a machine read movement reached one culmination in Forms (2012), a collaboration with Memo Akten. Commissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the two took archival footage of athletes in swimming, diving, high jump, pole vault and gymnastics, analysed the movement of their bodies, and translated it into abstract three-dimensional sculptures made of rods, spirals, cubes and spheres. The living body is extracted as movement data and crystallises into another geometry. The following year, in 2013, Forms won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in the Computer Animation category, placing Quayola's method on the international map.

Computing the Landscape

The rereading of painting eventually moved beyond still life and religious painting into the subject of landscape painting. Pleasant Places (2015) is one of the representative works. Quayola went into the rural country of Provence in southern France, where Van Gogh spent his final years, and filmed in ultra-high definition the trees and grasses whipped by the strong mistral. He then had an algorithm analyse that footage, leaving part of the image in photographic realism while dissolving another part into an abstraction resembling strokes of paint. Within a single image, the figurative of nature and the brushwork born of computation hold at the same time.

In the same lineage is Jardins d'Été, made between 2016 and 2017. Set in the gardens of the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire on the Loire in France, it is a series that captured flowers swaying in strong night winds at 4K resolution and recomposed them as "moving paintings". The title carries a Monet-like Impressionist ring, but what is depicted here is not the hand of a painter; it is the movement of wind and plants as analysed by a machine. The enterprise that the genre of landscape painting refined over several centuries — fixing nature onto a picture plane — Quayola performs once more, with a camera and an algorithm.

The Unfinished as a Subject

Quayola's interest does not stop at painting on the flat. In the Captives series, begun in 2013, he set as his subject Michelangelo's unfinished group of sculptures, the Prigioni (1513–1534), and their non finito — the technique of deliberately leaving a sculpture incomplete. Geological blocks of rock generated by complex mathematical functions are carved out by industrial robot arms, freezing the very moment at which an unfinished human body is beginning to rise out of a mass of marble. Between the completed human form and the disordered mass of nature: what Quayola consistently attends to is the space between the two.

This sense of the in-between is close to ma (間), the interval of Japanese spatial aesthetics. Just as Michelangelo's unfinished captives hang suspended, neither stone nor human body, Quayola's works keep to a territory that is neither the classical itself nor complete abstraction. Midway as the figurative collapses into the abstract, midway as movement is reduced to data, midway as architecture is transformed into plant — it is the time of that transition itself that he makes into work.

Kindled on the Façade

And in Arborescent, this subject was carried out onto a façade on the street. What Quayola read this time was neither painting nor sculpture but Gaudí's architecture itself. He took as the object of his analysis the organic principle of form that runs through Gaudí's designs — the gesture of translating the structures of nature into architecture — and out of it raised a system that simulates the growth of trees. The generated branches extend, divide and connect while responding to the actual relief of the façade, bringing to the surface the "hidden geometry" the building already possesses. Quayola himself describes that movement this way.

These arboreal formations grow, connect with the architectural elements, and sway as if moved by algorithmic noise mimicking the behavior of wind.

— designboomsource

The façade of Casa Batlló runs an annual "mapping" programme in which a contemporary artist covers the wall with imagery. Across 2022 and 2023, Refik Anadol turned this surface into a fluid vortex of data with Living Architecture (discussed in detail in Making Architecture Dream); in 2024 came Sofía Crespo's Structures of Being, and in 2025 Quayola's Arborescent followed. For 2026, United Visual Artists' Hidden Order is scheduled. Where Anadol trained an enormous dataset and had the building see a "memory", Quayola read Gaudí's forms themselves and grew "plants" on the building. The differences of method among the artists who stand on the same wall are now being recorded, year by year, on this façade.

Here lies the specificity of a screen shown on a city façade. In a museum gallery, viewing belongs to those who came with intent. You buy a ticket, enter, and stand before the work. But the arboreal forms growing on Gaudí's wall are open to the gaze of anyone walking along Passeig de Gràcia. The greater part of those 110,000 were not ticketed viewers inside the building but people standing in the street. And in 2025 the scene was broadcast live on the Catalan public channel TV3, reaching, it is reported, more than 220,000 viewers as well. In the middle of shopping, or through a screen at home, you glance up and the building has temporarily become something else — that accidental encounter is the experience that can happen only on a façade facing the street.

When the Eye That Reads the Canon Is Kindled in the City

Line Quayola's work up in a single row, from Strata to Arborescent, and one subject can be seen running through all of it: the operation of making the machine's eye "look" once more at the visual inheritance humanity has accumulated — the Baroque fresco, landscape painting, Michelangelo's sculpture, Gaudí's architecture. The machine does not reproduce the canon. It analyses, decomposes, and recomposes it into another form. Its output is an in-between image, neither the original nor complete abstraction.

Just as, in ink-wash painting, a small human figure or boat drawn into the landscape kindles meaning across the whole view, the arboreal forms growing over Casa Batlló at night produce a tenkei for one night in a familiar block of the city. It does not rewrite the block itself. It only kindles, temporarily, another life read by a machine onto the surface of a classic that is already there: Gaudí's architecture. Come morning, the façade is once again the stone building whose roof recalls the back of a dragon.

Painting and sculpture — the canon that was originally fixed inside museums and churches — becomes, by way of machine vision, a visible movement for a single night on the outer skin of a building facing the street. What Quayola's work shows is the possibility that, when enormous computation meets an enormous surface, the result need not end in a display of novelty. In its best moments it quietly adds a single point to the scenery of the city — a small tenkei for someone passing by to look up at, stop for, and then walk on from.

Sources

1. fig.001Mapping 2025: Quayola, "Arborescent" — Casa Batlló Contemporary
2. fig.002Forms — QUAYOLA
3. fig.003Pleasant Places — QUAYOLA
4. fig.004Jardins d'Été — QUAYOLA
5. [5]Selected Series — QUAYOLA official site
6. [6]QUAYOLA — Biography (bitforms gallery)
7. [7]Strata #1 — QUAYOLA
8. [8]Unfinished Sculptures (Captives) — QUAYOLA
9. [9]Quayola: From Prizewinner to Juror — Ars Electronica Blog (Golden Nica 2013)
10. [10]Casa Batlló returns with its iconic annual mapping by renowned artist Quayola — Casa Batlló Contemporary
11. [11]Italian artist Quayola brings new life to Gaudí's Casa Batlló with 'Arborescent' light show — Euronews
12. [12]Quayola reimagines Gaudí's Casa Batlló facade with swaying digital arboreal forms — designboom