PAUL RIEDMÜLLER: BLENDER
OPENING: 6pm, 2 October, 2024
Hybrid live set by ONTOPA
https://www.facebook.com/ontopamusic
On view until: 13 November , 2024
Text by: Kristóf Kovács (Gergely Sajnos CSI)

Paul Riedmüller's paintings are easy to identify with, as he places everyday elements in an artificial environment, creating a hybrid province, a representation of online and real space. Riedmüller's work goes beyond the representation of digital phenomena in and through painting into another medium, and is more about our perception of reality as altered by technology. The new spectral reality of the 'virtual village', which generates continuous pulses, is made familiar and experienced by displays. In effect, he uses the space of images to outline the visual culture that influences our present, thus defining his creative language. In this way, the painter makes his visual world comprehensible, leaving us with the challenge of deciphering and interpreting the constellation of familiar components he has created. The different layers of his paintings are the result of a complex process, collage compositions created with artificial image generators and a manual creative process. From found footage, he uses a sea of visual elements to create his collage compositions, which he then paints, reversing his digital image-making process. His paintings question our traditional visual consumption in a humorous and playful way. The surface of his works is shaped in an eye-deceiving way. He uses the most obvious form of representation, the trompe-l'œil, to capture the increasingly relative way in which we experience reality and painting's constant attempt to renew itself. In the context of digital deceptions (such as CGI and deepfake), it also serves as an appropriate proxy for the artist's investigation into the relationship between image and reality. Paul Riedmüller's works manipulatively simulate perspective, light and space, which act as an optical puzzle projected onto a plane.