Considering the Circular Topology of Clouds

Christian Bazant-Hegemark (* 1978) presents the current state of his engagement with painting and graphic art. Beyond his work with traditional oil painting and drawing, he now integrates more profound medial transformation processes into his artistic practice. He thereby examines how traditional painting themes operate when they make visual references to the contemporary media world and appropriate its formal codes.

Out of a dissatisfaction with the possibilities of digital image processing, Bazant-Hegemark has over the past two years developed image abstraction software (which allows unusual fragmentations and transformations, and can, among other things, calculate a virtual third dimension from two-dimensional images). The results of this software constitute part of his current image-finding process and are subsequently subjected to the editing capabilities of traditional image-processing programs.

In addition to this algorithmic image modification, Bazant-Hegemark has also begun to digitise image moments by hand. He "pixels" images on the computer, thereby referencing the video game aesthetics of the 1990s. The results retain the colour palettes of their originals, giving the underlying image references a surreal spin.

At the core of the exhibition are those works that subject iconic imagery (often award-authorised depictions of suffering) to a course of such transformations: hand-pixelled photojournalistic sources are algorithmically abstracted via software, then further processed in industry-standard image software – in order, printed on fabric, to be subjected to a traditional painting process.

Beyond probing a contemporary, expanded concept of painting, Bazant-Hegemark is concerned with an understanding of the expressive and representational capacity of visual media. In today's post-factual media world, the topos of authenticity has been lost – it has been exchanged for the self-referentiality of journalistic networks. Images are only relevant as surface – as spectacle and commodity. There is no longer any reliability regarding the accuracy of their content: reality and fiction have abandoned their distance in the media world. Contemporary mimetic painting thus finds itself in an unfamiliar situation: it can create, simulate and appropriate, but can only imagine true representational authenticity.