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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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