Art and technology meet in more places than a digital screen. They meet in the questions people ask about perception, movement, intelligence, and their relationship with the things they make. Joe Taveras’s path through robotics and painting offers one way into that conversation.
Before beginning to paint in Los Angeles in March 2020, Taveras worked at Temi, a personal robotics company. His work included introducing the technology across retail, hospitality, and healthcare and developing applications for the robot. Painting became a different setting in which to explore questions about people, systems, and physical experience.
A background in systems, a practice in materials
Taveras’s biography describes a practice concerned with consciousness, interconnectedness, and the relationship between matter and movement. Acrylic, oil sticks, ink, and watercolor are among the materials in that practice. Layered color and spontaneous gesture give those concerns a physical form on a surface.
The connection to technology does not mean every painting illustrates a device or explains a scientific theory. It offers a context for looking. A title, a repeated symbol, or a figure assembled from angular parts may invite questions about how information is organized and how a person recognizes meaning within it.
Read more about Taveras’s work in robotics
Looking at Input/Output
Input/Output (2022) places a yellow profile-like form against an expansive blue area. Beside it, a pale field carries many small black marks. One way to approach the painting is to follow the boundary between the blue space and the patterned area. The eye encounters a transition from relative openness to accumulated visual information.
The title supplies another point of entry. ‘Input’ and ‘output’ suggest receiving and responding, but the painting leaves room to ask what kind of exchange is taking place. These are observations and possible readings of the work. They do not establish a single intended explanation or turn the painting into a technical diagram.
View Input/Output in the artwork archive
The figure as an arrangement of parts
BOT34 (2023) offers a different encounter. Angular areas of red, green, yellow, and black gather into a figure-like composition. Some elements suggest mechanical parts; others resemble the features of a face. Looking between those possibilities is part of the interest of the image.
Compare BOT34 with Input/Output. Where does each composition concentrate its marks? How does an outline create the impression of a figure? Which features seem familiar, and which resist a quick identification? These questions allow the work’s visual decisions to lead the conversation.
Compare the figure and structure in BOT34
Connection beyond the canvas
Taveras is also the Founder and CEO of New Renaissance, a platform for creative people, and a cofounder of Interesting Concepts with Jess Mouawad. Those projects extend his work into building tools and spaces for people to encounter ideas and one another.
The paintings remain individual objects with their own materials, scale, and visual questions. Understanding the background can deepen an encounter, while looking closely keeps that encounter grounded in the work itself. Begin with a painting, spend time with what is present, and use the biography as another layer of context.