Pilotism – the Millenium Nomads

EY PROJECTS is pleased to announce our duo show “Pilotism - the Millennium Nomads” with artists Daniel Roibal and Zach Zono. The show opens on 28th September 2024 and runs until 10 December. 

“Pilotism” is a neologism that describes the courageous, brave, and adventurous spirit of a pilot. It is a word we use to describe a new form of abstract language and a contemporary state of being characterised by Daniel Roibal and Zach Zono.

Both artists have a father who works as a pilot. This pleasant coincidence inspires the title of the show and the very terminology “pilotism”. Having a pilot father allows the two artists the thirst as well as the condition to travel and experience the world. Constant international travel gives rise to an open, fluid and chaotic state of mind – a distinctive phenomenological experience. For both, abstraction is a form of artistic language that summarises an attempt to seek order within chaos, departing from figuration but ending up in the spiritual realm.

Greenberg viewed abstraction as a characteristic facet of modern painting, for if art was to be authentically modern, each medium had to pursue a process of rationalisation which would progressively disentangle it from other, related mediums. For Greenberg, abstraction as a language referred back to painting itself and disavowed any reference to the external world. However, in the contemporary context, abstraction acquires new meanings and speaks to the shift of the focus of art from collective experience to individual empiricism by transforming figurative objects into abstract forms, a formalistic and universal language.

Chinese critic Qingsheng Zhu divides abstraction into three types: the first is characterised by Kandinsky and Mondrian, the second by Picasso, Pollock and the subsequent Minimalist Movement. The Third Abstraction is specifically a Chinese version of abstraction that combines Western Abstraction and the spiritual pursuits of Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. Here, EY Projects aims to introduce the fourth type of abstraction, which is global in scale, and is a necessary result caused by a nomadic lifestyle led by many of the latest generation – the resulting disorientation in location, in cognition, in identity politics. This nomadism not only demonstrates a state of physical movement among different geographical locations, but also connotes a Deleuzian sense of Nomadism which describes the way in which one crosses the plane of immanence and many becomings. It is a contemporary phenomenological experience of living under perpetual shift.

Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology is an ever-expanding conceptual playing-field that expands philosophy from transcendental ideas of concepts of immanence that go back to the complex processes of earthly life and issues of ecology.[1] The ecological concept of rhizome symbolizes a symbiotic network of matter-energy flow with no mega narrative or leitmotif. “Pilotism” is a celebration of this nomadic state of being in which chaos and disorientation become universal and therefore unify and ensure the existence of interpersonal connectivity.

Both Zach Zono and Daniel Roibal’s work depart from the natural landscape – foliage, mountains, forests of a particular geographic location – but meanwhile resonates with the audience regardless of background due to their universal abstract artistic language. Through dynamic strokes and bright colours, Zono and Roibal celebrate this chaos and encourage free interpretation. The impression of one particular landscape is joined by memories of other places, other experiences, figments, fragments The abstract language becomes a medium that unifies, explains, and rationalizes an array of assemblages. At the same time, this process from concrete objects to abstract formal language is highly individualized with no fixed pattern. The significance of abstraction in the contemporary context goes beyond legitimizing painting as a medium but captures and defines the very condition where systems and mega time-machines crumble, and having differences becomes the only similarity the world shares.