Paintings of paused VHS frames

Swiss artist Andy Denzler makes oil paintings inspired by the glitchy paused frames of VHS tapes. From Wired UK:

"I'm pushing the boundaries and possibilities of abstract and photorealism. It's as if I've pressed the fast-forward on a video machine, then hit the pause button, so reality comes to a stand-still. I speed up and slow down the colours. What remains is a distorted moment -- classically painted, oil on canvas -- which, upon closer inspection is very abstract, but from distance looks real."

Andy Denzler

"Paintings inspired by paused VHS tapes" (Wired UK)

• [Anthony Barba]

  Reminds me of Enda O’Donoghue.
  http://www.endaism.com/commuter/mmmmmmmmm

  • [vgrange]

    nice link, more like digital glitches, I found this one great: http://www.endaism.com/fragments/being-digital

• [jetfx]

  While I like the paintings, I don’t really think they’re very boundary pushing.

• [jere7my]

  Wow. These are stunning. I’m sure they’re way beyond my budget, but I would love to have one of these on my livingroom wall.

• [Cowicide]

  Brilliant.  I love this idea and implementation.

• [Peter]

  Pushing the boundaries – of a likeness and affinity with the work of Gerhard Richter. 

  • [Marshall]

    My first thoughts exactly.

    Also, an artist should never, ever tell the audience how to interpret artwork in a statement.  Let them decide if your work pushes any boundaries.  As someone who has worked as a contemporary art curator for over a decade, that kind of language in an artist’s statement tends generate both laughter and set my mind to “roundfile”.

    The paintings are good, though.

• [overground]

  I really like the painting, but I am somewhat disappointment by the artist’s slightly poncy comments.

  • [Chris Bell]

    You don’t read artists’ comments very often, then.

• [pjcamp]

  I gonna paint scrambled porn and charge $10,000 each.

  • [Tim Quinn]

    The trick is actually getting the price.

  • [Marshall]

    You’d be like the 10th guy doing that at this point.

• [GiovanniGF]

  I guess no one here is familiar with Gerhard Richter’s paintings?

• [Seth Bro]

  No of course not, @GiovannniGF. Please tell us who Gerhard Richter is.

• [chris arkenberg]

  I really like these. Thanks for the post!

• [patentlyabsurd]

  Can someone write some kind of art-speak generator?

  • [James Maidment]

    It’s difficult to enter into this work because of how the internal dynamic of the biomorphic forms spatially undermines the distinctive formal juxtapositions.

    http://www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html (using 80085 as input phrase for the lulz)

  • [digi_owl]

    Tsaurus via a random number generator?

• [gabbi]

  Not boundary pushing or original. My ex’s sister had this as an assignment as an art major about 20 yrs ago.

• [penguinchris]

  I love the effect. I don’t like the linked Enda O’Donoghue ones as much… that effect is cool too, but the subject matter isn’t interesting and the underlying painting skill is not as good.

  That said, Andy Denzler’s subject matter isn’t always particularly interesting either. It looks like it’s all paused frames from home videos, and not particularly interesting home videos. The video effect is really effective on all of them, but I’d say only about 1/3 of them are particularly interesting aesthetically or intriguingly as art.

  So I looked up Gerhard Richter, and he has a series of paintings that are kind of similar I guess… but they were done in the 60′s and they’re clearly not inspired by paused video tape. I could see them being inspired by crappy TV signals, though. Here’s an example. Many of his paintings are astonishingly photo-realistic, though, and definitely worth checking out on his site.

  • [kittnkat]

    Why does a painting have to be photo-realistic to be so impressive to people? Just go look at a photo!

    • [Marshall]

      An obsession with realism in art is a neurosis that’s unique to European culture and reflects the tremendous limiting of acceptable ways to view or represent the world in Christian culture. 

      When the first realist painters arrived in the imperial Chinese court, their paintings were totally dismissed as interesting novelties, as opposed to the “real art” of Chinese literati painters, whose works were conceptual centuries before the idea even occurred to European painters.

• [Ray Perkins]

  Coming next: adding clicks and pops to MP3 files to emulate vinyl. Damn, I’m gonna be rich!

• [harry_alan]

  I know Gerhard Richter’s paintings very well, I am a big fan and this work, it has to be said, is very close to some of his, at least in technique. But actually there are a lot of painters copying Richter, some better than others. Still I must say I do like some of these paintings too. 

  Also that other artist that someone else mentioned, Enda O’Donoghue, these are really interesting. I’d never seen anything like this before. They are not really photo-realistic or anything like that and I don’t think that they are beautiful, I’m not sure but Andy Denzler’s are definitely prettier. But looking at   O’Donoghue’s website he’s done some that look like they came from peoples profile pics on Facebook. Really pixelated pointless banal jpegs turned into paintings that capture the quality of the digital image that we’ve all become so used to. There is something to that I think.

• [pjcamp]

  Damn! All of my great ideas have already been had by someone else. That’s conclusive proof the world is overpopulated.

• [teddanson]

  Actually, people like Burial do use vinyl noises as a rhythmic and atmospheric effect, so that’s not new. EDIT: That was in reply to Ray Perkins.

• [Rich Keller]

  I like these. They’re pretty interesting to me as permanent records of something so ephemeral and random. They’re dichotomous to me that way, almost beautifully absurd. And Richter is new to me. I hadn’t seen anything of his.  

  I think that the obssession with innovation and the need to challenge the definition of art borders on the neurotic. Can’t artists be comfortable with just expressing themselves without having the expectation of founding a movement forced on them? And if they found a movement, anyone who follows it will be an immitative hack because they aren’t innovating on their own. If things aren’t part of a continuum, it’s all just meaningless noise. Not everyone is going to be a trailblazer. But that’s my opinion.

• [Alicia Reneé Jones]

  Reminds me of John Waters’ “Little Pictures” series.