Artist: Paul Riedmüller
Exhibition title: Blender
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: October 2 – November 20, 2024
Photography: ©Dávid Biró / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Horizont Gallery, Budapest
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.
His first Hungarian debut exhibition at Horizont Gallery is entitled ‘Blender’. In addition to its literal meaning (in German it is ‘imposter‘ or ‘trickster‘), it also refers to the freely available three-dimensional graphics program of the same name, which Riedmüller often uses to model his images. The software for creating visual effects is named after the electropop song of the same name by Yello. Written at the dawn of the nineties, the song, which builds on a variety of sound patterns to create a rather distinctive atmosphere, both atmospherically and musically, expresses all the experimental character that the editing software can offer.
The title of the exhibition can be understood as a metaphor for the three-dimensional reconstruction of the world. It also reflects the diverse state of our present, the ongoing search for the right balance between reality and the ‘digital other’. In the works in the exhibition, the increasing blurring of the boundaries between reality and illusion is as important as the space built by the computer program and its decoration.
Text by Kristóf Kovács (Gergely Sajnos, CSI)
