A camera produces a glitch by accident, in a fraction of a second. A painter who wants one has to build it: mix the colour, lay the band, keep the edge clean, and do it again the next day. A small group of painters on Art of NOMA's roster take the slow route, making in oil the exact marks a screen makes when it fails. This is a guide to what they are doing, and why it is worth a collector's attention.
What is glitch painting?
In this context, a glitch is the visual signature of a digital image going wrong: a face dragged sideways as if the head moved faster than the shutter, a stack of hard horizontal bands where a signal dropped out, colour smeared across a frame. Glitch painting takes those effects out of the device and remakes them with a brush.
The distinction that matters is that nothing here is accidental. Each interruption is planned, mixed and painted, often with more care than the parts of the picture it interrupts. What looks like damage is the most deliberate passage on the canvas.
Why would a painter hand-paint a digital error?
Because the subject is how people are seen now. JoCa's own site describes the work as sitting at the intersection of identity, technology and social transformation, particularly the anonymity and hyper-reality of social media and virtual environments, where self-image is continually reformed under filters, surveillance and avatars. The fragmented face, in that account, is what that condition looks like.
There is also a quieter argument about time. A screen error takes no effort; a painted one takes time. Rebuilding a machine's failure slowly, by hand, in oil, turns something disposable into something that has to be looked at. The joke is serious, and it is aimed at the viewer's phone.
How does JoCa use the glitch?
JoCa's portraits deliberately refuse to resolve, an approach JoCa calls non finito. The face is worked up and broken down in the same image. In Nuclear Seed, a head and shoulders at 150 × 150 cm, the top third breaks into bands of cold blue, red, white and black that run edge to edge like a transmission cutting out, while the collar beneath is painted with patient, traditional care. In The Dreamer (19) the obliteration hardens into pink and cream bands with clean edges, the language of a corrupted file.
The same move runs through the Echoes of Haworth series, where faces drawn from the Brontë sisters fracture into what JoCa calls visual "glitches". That series sold out on its opening night at Galera 32, Mexico City, on 17 September 2026, in under two hours; our account of that evening covers how.
Art of NOMA represents JoCa. Works available through the gallery are in the JoCa collection, among them Self Assemble 1 (oil on canvas, 105 × 105 cm, 2025), a painting about identity as something built, dismantled and reassembled.
What does Arturo Lemus Beltrán bring to it?
Where JoCa breaks the portrait, Arturo Lemus Beltrán keeps it almost unbearably intact. His hyperreal oils stage encounters between humans and robots, the digital and the painterly, using the vocabulary of old-master realism: smooth modelling, controlled light, convincing volume. Glitch and reflection are then allowed to disturb a surface finished too carefully to tolerate them.
El Fruto Del Nuevo Edén (120 × 180 cm) takes the oldest story about forbidden knowledge and reframes it as a question about technology. The effect, as our profile of the artist puts it, is that the more real the scene looks, the stranger it reads.
Why is being watched a subject for young painters?
The glitch is one half of the digital self: the image that fails. The other half is the image that never stops being taken. Two painters on the roster make that their subject directly.
Lemus Beltrán's Ensayo De Un Panóptico II (120 × 90 cm) is titled after the panopticon, the architecture designed so that anyone inside might be watched at any moment without knowing when. The painting treats being seen as both its subject and its structure, and its polished reflections are part of the argument.
Daniel Stara (b. 2000, Florida) is an emerging painter whose surreal, impressionistic landscapes fuse classical imagery with post-apocalyptic unease. Surveillance and generational disillusionment run through the work. Age of Surveillance, a 150 × 150 cm oil from 2025 now in a private collection, makes visibility itself the subject, treated as atmosphere rather than a scene; its square format casts the viewer as both watcher and watched. For My Next Trick (116 × 175 cm, 2025) holds the charged pause before a reveal. More in Daniel Stara: paintings about being watched.
What happens when the face is simply left out?
Not every painter on this question reaches for the screen. Karlos Ibarra paints the human figure as a vessel for feeling rather than likeness, and his subjects often appear without defined features. In In Sync XVIII (acrylic on canvas, 90 × 70 cm, 2026), two figures are held in a measured balance; with the faces left open, the reading shifts to stance and nearness.
It is a useful counterpoint. JoCa and Lemus Beltrán interrupt the face; Ibarra withholds it. Both ask how much of a person you need to see before you recognise them, a question our earlier piece on artists exploring identity through painting approaches from another direction.
How should you look at, and collect, this kind of work?
- See it at two distances. From across a room you see the figure; up close the figure gives way to what the paint is doing, the ridge, the drag, the exact edge where a smooth passage meets a rough one. A phone screen shows neither, which is the point.
- Take scale seriously. A glitch the width of your shoulders, as in a 150 × 150 cm canvas, is a different experience from one on a 50 cm canvas. Check the dimensions on every product page and mark them on the wall.
- Read the title. In this work the title often does the explaining: a panopticon, a trick, a seed, a dreamer. Our guide to what an artwork's title tells you is a good companion.
- Buy the original. The meaning of a hand-built glitch depends on its being hand-built. Every work linked here is a unique original on canvas; product pages list medium, year, dimensions and, where stated, the certificate of authenticity.
Art of NOMA represents around forty artists across painting, photography and sculpture. Browse the full roster, the original paintings, or join the Collector's List to hear about new work first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is glitch painting?
Painting that recreates the look of digital failure, such as dropped signals, corrupted files or smeared frames, by hand. JoCa and Arturo Lemus Beltrán both build these effects slowly in oil rather than capturing them by accident.
Which Art of NOMA artists paint glitch or the digital self?
JoCa, whose portraits fracture into hand-painted glitches; Arturo Lemus Beltrán, whose hyperreal oils stage humans and robots; and Daniel Stara, whose landscapes take surveillance as a subject. Karlos Ibarra approaches the same question by painting figures without defined features.
Is a glitch painting a digital print?
No. The works discussed here are unique original paintings on canvas. The glitch is an effect painted by hand, not a printed or digitally generated image.
Where can I buy JoCa's paintings?
Through Art of NOMA, which represents JoCa, in the JoCa collection on artofnoma.com, and on the artist's own site, joca-art.com.