At Blue Gallery in Venice, an exhibition exploring the boundaries between chance, memory and artistic creation.
Some images continue to transform long after they are first made. This idea lies at the heart of Archaeology of the Future, the new solo exhibition by Alan Rogers at Blue Gallery in Venice.
The project began with an archive of Ektachrome slides photographed by the artist in Wales several decades ago. When Rogers digitised them in 2025, he discovered that some had undergone unexpected colour transformations. Intense purples, acidic yellows and fluid greens had dissolved the original subjects, revealing surfaces reminiscent of mineral landscapes, astronomical imagery and microscopic worlds. Rather than correcting these changes, Rogers embraced them, creating three large-format prints in which time becomes an active participant in the artistic process.
The exhibition also features watercolours meticulously reproducing the yellowed plastic sleeves that had protected the slides, alongside mixed-media paintings in which similar layers and textures emerge through deliberate artistic gestures. Two seemingly opposing processes — the spontaneous action of time and the intentional choices of the artist — converge in a shared visual language.
Both an artist and a DJ, Rogers approaches his practice through a logic akin to remixing: fragments and images are revisited, transformed and layered until they acquire a new identity. Archaeology of the Future moves beyond nostalgia for the past, questioning authorship and the relationship between artistic control and unpredictability.
Who is the author of an image when time continues to alter it? Rogers leaves the question open, suggesting that an artwork may not be complete when it is first created, but continues to evolve until something finally brings its transformation to a close.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, 29 October, at 6 pm at Blue Gallery in Venice and runs until 29 November 2026.