ZURICH.- Mai 36 Galerie is presenting where love appears, the first solo exhibition by British artist Jack Warne. Here, he assembles a new body of work that positions painting as one conduit within a broader circuitry of images, sounds, and interfaces, redirecting attention from discrete objects to the configurational field they collectively compose and expanding the perceptual conditions under which painting unfolds.

The exhibition is framed by a historical tension between then and now. In the nineteenth century, Romantic painters and poets turned to the landscape as a site of resistance to industrial modernity, asserting emotion, imagination, and subjective experience against the rationalizing forces of mechanization and the city. Romanticism's critique was not a simple rejection of reason but a mistrust of instrumental rationality, the kind that reduces life to what can be measured and controlled. Warne's departure from London to the British coasts and rural environments of Dorset, Cornwall, and the Lake District updates that gesture for the age of artificial intelligence. This move is less about picturesque scenery than about stepping outside a regime of permanent connectivity, data streams, and algorithmic optimization.

In this sense, where love appears proposes a kind of AI Romanticism that is neither technophilic nor nostalgic. The term refers not to a sentimental view of technology but to an exploration of how emotional and sensory experience can be reconfigured within it. To understand Warne as a multimodal artist is to recognize that his medium lies less in any single support than in the mediated constellation they form, a constellation that rearticulates relations between visual, auditory, and tactile perception.

Warne's longstanding experience of Thiel-Behnke corneal dystrophy, a rare eye condition that progressively alters his sight, rendering him blind, lends this question of appearance particular urgency. This threat displaces the primacy of vision and recenters other modes of orientation, touch, balance, the awareness of edges and voids, the pressure of sound in space. This embodied encounter with instability and transformation connects Warne's practice to the Romantic pursuit of the sublime, not as a distant ideal but as a lived condition of uncertainty that redefines perception itself. His landscapes and interior representations do not merely depict idyllic scenarios; they condense the haptic experience of place, the pressure of wind, the slipperiness of wet rock, the density of air, the uncertainty of distance. Paintings such as Burnmoor Nart (2025) serve as a means to fix the memory of this embodied "where" before it disappears, transforming each work into a record of an encounter with terrain as much as an image of it. In this sense, the Romantic landscape tradition, from Turner's storms to Constable's clouds and Wordsworth's walking poems, reappears not as citation but as a latent archive through which Warne filters a contemporary life marked by infinite scroll, dematerialized labor, and ubiquitous interfaces.

The notion of love in the exhibition's title names this irreducible affective dimension. Rather than a romantic theme, love stands for everything that resists translation into binary code: empathy, care, grief, vulnerability, and fleeting joy. Warne's practice suggests that these affective states cannot be digitized or simulated without remainder, for they belong to the fragile domain of what philosopher Gilbert Simondon described as individuation, the continuous process through which a subject comes into relation with its milieu. His works emerge from a continual passage between digital files, photographic fragments, sound, augmented reality, and pigment on canvas, refusing the separation between old and new media in favor of a single, elastic field of experience. The image seeks an opportunity to become a catalyst for the Barthesian punctum, that unprogrammable detail that pierces the viewer. Standing before works such as Star Dengar (2025), we sense how Warne’s gestures of erasure, dripping, veiling, and defocusing do not guarantee such an encounter but create the conditions for it. Meaning shifts from the narrative content of the image to the act of looking itself, with all its hesitations and projections.

In previous projects such as Blind at the age of four, Warne has combined paintings with AR experiences and audio derived from his music, creating multisensory environments. Where love appears continues this line of inquiry by treating AR and sound not as novelty or spectacle, but as another layer in the processing of images. Each physical work is tethered to a virtual counterpart that remains dormant until the viewer activates it through a device. When this hidden layer appears, expanding into volume, sound, or motion, the work exposes the plasticity of perception, showing how swiftly the eye and body accommodate a new object in space and how easily reality is reconfigured by a small shift in input. Rather than proposing the virtual as a replacement for the real, Warne uses augmented reality to demonstrate their entanglement and reveal how permeable the border between them has become. The painting ceases to be a fixed window and becomes an interface whose full dimension is only gradually disclosed.

where love appears stages the intrinsic tensions of contemporary life, introducing friction where systems promise seamlessness and opacity where interfaces offer transparency, generating an exhibition of slow absorption and prolonged resonance.

Jack Warne is a British artist and Musician born in 1995 in Cambridge (UK), who lives and works in Cornwall and develops a practice that merges painting, sound composition and augmented reality into immersive visual environments. He graduated in Graphic and Media Design from the University of the Arts London (BA, 2017) and in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art (MA, 2019), and is regarded as a leading emerging voice in technologically driven contemporary art.

Throughout his career, Warne has presented solo exhibitions and projects including “Concrete Void” at Southbank Centre London, “Blind At The Age Of Four” at the ICA London and “Alors je ferme les yeux" at Spiaggia Libera, Paris. His work was also featured in group exhibitions such as “Perfect Partner in the Near Future” at YUELAI Art Museum (China), “Capital” at the Barbican Centre (London), and “Neuroscience & Diversity” at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), positioning his practice within key international debates around digital image-making, disability, technology and contemporary visual culture.