Andy Denzler

August 17, 2011 7:59 AM

Andy Denzler is an artist some of whose paintings resemble paused VHS tapes.
posted by shakespeherian (56 comments total)

Oh, man, I love, love, love these. I wrote (GRATUITOUS SELF-LINK) a bit about them yesterday, in fact. I just wish I could see them in person. The distortions look like they have so much physical texture to them that just doesn't come across in the images.

Also, this is a link to the complete gallery. It's hard to see, but the 1-7 numbers on the lower-right hand corner are individual gallery pages. There is a lot of these paintings.
posted by griphus at 8:07 AM on August 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

This one is probably my favorite. Between the scene and the extreme distortion, it's almost scary. What is going on? Why are they being taped in the woods? Why is the tape in such bad shape? Where is the light coming from?
posted by griphus at 8:08 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Great paintings, but what if Andy just needs his tracking adjusted?
posted by orme at 8:11 AM on August 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

Here's the digital version. More.
posted by fake at 8:16 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I love this century.
posted by The Whelk at 8:16 AM on August 17, 2011 [6 favorites]

I'm curious to know if he's working from actual video images or if he's doing it all straight to canvas. Either one is impressive, but somehow it would be cooler if he was pulling the distortions and snow out of his head instead of a visual reference.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:18 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Love it. The colors in some suggest a base in film or photos, but then there are the pastel ones, some of which look more like a Lucien Freud or something.

Is he doing the video thing in the sculpture, or are the horizontal lines there about something else?
posted by Ahab at 8:31 AM on August 17, 2011

I like this. I suppose, though, this signature style will be swiftly turned into an easily-applied filter.
posted by chavenet at 8:37 AM on August 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

It looks to me as if he's working from photographs. The technique quite closely resembles Richter's - from wikipedia:

"He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur"—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects: 1. It offers the image a photographic appearance; and 2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter's actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself."

Not to detract from it, he's clearly a talented motherfucker and the images are all very evocative - but this is quite a common technique, which is taught by rote at some art schools (he is more likely to be doing the teaching though...).
posted by pmcp at 8:43 AM on August 17, 2011

He must love Gerhard Richter.
posted by ReeMonster at 8:51 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Art of the 21st century is the broken images of the 20th century.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:53 AM on August 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

Make sure all your smeared, torn, badly tracked distortions are happy smeared, torn, badly tracked distortions!
posted by Xoebe at 8:56 AM on August 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

There are quite a few technical & stylistic differences between Denzler and Richter.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:57 AM on August 17, 2011

Not saying one or the other is better, I just think Denzler is probably heavily influenced.. I mean, who WOULDN'T be influenced by Richter.. guy's a genius.
posted by ReeMonster at 8:59 AM on August 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I also immediately thought Richter, then read this:

Denzler told Wired.co.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 standstill. I speed up and slow down the colors. What remains is a distorted moment — classically painted, oil on canvas — which, upon closer inspection is very abstract, but from distance looks real.”

Pushing some boundaries all right.
posted by stance at 9:02 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

The technique might be similar, but the medium being simulated is completely different. A frame of a video tape isn't a frame, like a single frame of film or a photograph, it's an interlaced part of a constantly-moving stream of images. There's a lot more narrative time stretching back and forth in time in Denzler's than Richter's, even if the technique may be similar.
posted by griphus at 9:17 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

These are great, has anyone here seen them in real life yet? As for the Gerhard Richter influence, I agree it's part of it, but I also think he's also doing something with Luc Tuymans. If you are painting the figure, which is a big part of what he is doing, it's pretty hard to get around these two artists at the moment. He's found a way to do that on his own terms which is fascinating, while incorporating ideas about things like representation, reproduction, and so forth.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 9:18 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also the technique may be similar. I don't know if I got that across. "That" being that the technique may be similar.
posted by griphus at 9:18 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

These are nice paintings and I also wish I could see them in person because it's hard to judge how tactile and/or abstract passages of these are from digital reproductions. Personally though I think his strongest work (at least as far as the online images go) are the pieces that mix smaller sections of distorted horizontal smears and breaks with more painterly areas.

See: here and here. The disjointed collage feel in these creates more ruptures and mystery in the images than in the ones that seem more literal and appear to be Richter-like in their execution.
posted by stagewhisper at 9:19 AM on August 17, 2011

I don't know much about art, but I love me some Richter, and this guy obviously seems like an outgrowth or related in a way that I'm equally interested in.

I've always been fascinated -- though not fascinated enough to learn anything about it -- how Richter and non-film-using visual artists in general were shaped by photograph technology. Now with this, I can't help but think how the world will be different because of the clarity of DVDs, HD and BlueRay. In 20 years, how many people are even going to remember what a paused VHS tape looks like? (Not that he's doing it -- or its interesting -- as that sort of archive... just that it's interesting to think about the art outlasting the inspiration.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:23 AM on August 17, 2011

Now with this, I can't help but think how the world will be different because of the clarity of DVDs, HD and BlueRay.

With new image technologies come new image corruptions.
posted by griphus at 9:28 AM on August 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

I'm too out of my depth to get into a discussion about painting, so I should keep my mouth shut, but it was reading the quote stance has added that made me feel a little uneasy - but I'm quite happy to believe it's a quote stripped of all context and used by wired in an awkward way. I do think it's more than just the technique that is an outgrowth of that Richteresque way of working though - a lot of the same concepts come up to do with representation and painterly time.
posted by pmcp at 9:31 AM on August 17, 2011

I've always been fascinated -- though not fascinated enough to learn anything about it -- how Richter and non-film-using visual artists in general were shaped by photograph technology.

I'm also fascinated by this sort of thing, and one of my favorite bits of turning-art-history-into-narrative is that at least as far back as Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec you can see photography's influence on painting-- look at the way that, suddenly, composition gets problematized, with figures cut off by the edge of the canvas, as though the painter is capturing a moment of a world rather than portraying an optimal image.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:35 AM on August 17, 2011

Ugh, there's a young painter whose name I don't quite know who does similar stuff and it's KILLING ME. He goes by "Kon" or "Kahn" or something, I think he's of Russian descent, his first name might be Konstantine or something, he went to SVA and he's been in a number of galleries in NYC. Can anyone help me out here?

His paintings are more abstract and graphic, but are very much VHS freeze frame inspired.
posted by nathancaswell at 9:35 AM on August 17, 2011

Love these, and would love to see where he goes when he starts mixing this technique with other techniques.

I've spent years listening to the way that satellite telephones create an accent, almost, in which everyone sounds a bit like the same person, and it's one of those great challenges that makes ingenuity bloom. What can one do with an accidental emergence like this?

Hendrix took his sound and his instrument and pushed them till they broke, then played the break as a new instrument. Eno's well annotated EMS Synthi AKS broke down frequently, but he'd leave instructions to the repair tech to leave certain broken functions broken if he felt like the break was better than the designed purpose of that circuit. Distortion stops being a corruption and becomes a form in the right hands.

Somewhere along the way, someone figured out that rotten milk could be turned into cheese, and we ended up with Stilton and other glories.

Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention.
posted by sonascope at 9:42 AM on August 17, 2011 [9 favorites]

There's a Duchamp glass piece, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, that broke during shipping. As the story goes, the artist was delighted with the result.
posted by griphus at 10:10 AM on August 17, 2011

Ugh, there's a young painter whose name I don't quite know who does similar stuff and it's KILLING ME.

I had a classmate who did similar stuff. I don't think she shows actively any more.

These are cool, but he's not really master of his domain yet. He seems to be only starting to choose his images to have... you know... anything to do with anything. Still, it looks to me like he's leaning on his figure painting ability and then OOO YEAH DRAGGING CARDBOARD ACROSS IT, which for sure produces evocative images, but there's a lot more he can do with what he's stumbled upon. He's really only playing with the technique and not the image itself, if you know what I mean, and there's something interesting in there about the artist's confidence and ability in relation to the general pressure a painter feels to do either pure realism or depart from it, and the simultaneous desire to show everyone your work and just produce it and then have nothing to do with it.

They way he's going, though, he could get there in, like, six months. I'd like to see it then.
posted by cmoj at 10:14 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

You discovered this on my twitter feed, didn't you.

Or we subscribe the the same fine arts blogs.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:35 AM on August 17, 2011

I got it from Bright Stupid Confetti.

But now I'm totally going to steal stuff from your twitter feed.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:38 AM on August 17, 2011

And I am going to subscribe to Bright Stupid Confetti.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:45 AM on August 17, 2011

Ugh, there's a young painter whose name I don't quite know who does similar stuff and it's KILLING ME.

I had his name in an old email... it was Kon Trubkovich. Looks like he's represented by Marianne Boesky.
posted by nathancaswell at 10:45 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

These are cool, but he's not really master of his domain yet. He seems to be only starting to choose his images to have... you know... anything to do with anything.

It's funny, I thought the paintings on the first page were far and away the least successful because they look like he just got some friends to pose for him in his apartment so he could try out the technique. The subject matter in earlier paintings seems more suited to the sense of nostalgia that this technique evokes. To be sure, there's a lot of room to subvert that nostalgia, and I hope that's a direction he takes it in, but the subjects of the most recent paintings seem to have an almost neutral relationship to the way in which they're presented. I guess you could read that neutrality as a type of subversion, and there's an interesting recursive aspect to the fact that the figures in his recent paintings seem to be experiencing a sense of nostalgia themselves, but there's something about them that keeps me from enjoying them as much as, say, this one or this one.
posted by invitapriore at 11:01 AM on August 17, 2011

Or we subscribe the the same fine arts blogs.

Linkdump plz
posted by griphus at 11:08 AM on August 17, 2011

Here are a few I like.

Rhizome
We Make Money Not Art
Pruned
;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Art Fag City
VVork
Wooster Collective
Fubiz
Computerlove
Yay! Everyday!
posted by shakespeherian at 11:23 AM on August 17, 2011 [7 favorites]

It's funny, I thought the paintings on the first page were far and away the least successful because they look like he just got some friends to pose for him in his apartment so he could try out the technique.

Yeah, I don't think they're more successful (I hadn't made it to the first painting you link... that one's my favorite now), it's just that it's occurred to him to engineer the base image more. I think it's the right direction, even if his early few are pretty contrived.
posted by cmoj at 11:25 AM on August 17, 2011

Oh, heh, figure I'd share mine. Going through my Google Reader feeds, I just realized about five of them have completely stopped updating and I didn't notice. Here's what's left:

Erratic Phenomena
Phantasmaphile
posted by griphus at 11:29 AM on August 17, 2011

I like these but I’m pushing the boundaries and possibilities of abstract and photorealism makes me want to dismiss him as Richter w/ a VHS deck just to take him down a notch.

Paint, man, and leave the talkin' to the critics!
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:33 AM on August 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I’m pushing the boundaries and possibilities of abstract and photorealism

That is incredibly tame for statement-speak.
posted by nathancaswell at 11:37 AM on August 17, 2011

Mine:

Akrylic
Artforum
Artlurker
Artopia
Artsjournal
Contemporary Art Blog
I Like This Art
Juxtapoz
MoCo Loco
New Art
Unurth
Who Killed Bambi

And now I shall add Shakespeherian and Griphus's.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 11:42 AM on August 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

Psh, you and your alphabet.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:02 PM on August 17, 2011

And I have just created an FPP based on a link from one of those blogs.

I'd say our work is done for today, friends. Let's get a drink.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:08 PM on August 17, 2011

"I’m pushing the boundaries and possibilities of abstract and photorealism"

Artist statements are difficult. I think that's just a poorly written attempt at saying "I'm exploring boundaries between abstraction and photorealism" which reads as a completely legitimate description.

Rule number one of an artist's statement is you should never claim control over the audience's experience of your work and/or the work's success in whatever it is you are trying to communicate or investigate through it. Otherwise the work itself is usually going to fall short when tested against those claims, and its merits will be considered from within a very narrow framework by the viewer.
posted by stagewhisper at 12:17 PM on August 17, 2011

I'd say our work is done for today, friends. Let's get a drink.

What's near the Walker? I'm probably going to be out there in November.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:32 PM on August 17, 2011

There's drinks at the Walker! Give a holler!

If I haven't moved to LA by then, I will drink with you.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:38 PM on August 17, 2011

Never move to LA.

I've been there.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:44 PM on August 17, 2011

I've lived there.

Don't plan on doing anything strenuous outdoors.
posted by griphus at 12:47 PM on August 17, 2011

Also, I'm going to be in the Twin Cities in late September (paid Jewish holidays off is awesome.)
posted by griphus at 12:49 PM on August 17, 2011

On the other hand I may be in San Diego in December.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:53 PM on August 17, 2011

Never move to LA.

I am a former Angelino and miss it. Never move to Minneapolis. The winters here very literally kill people. They'll kill me if I am here for another one.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:06 PM on August 17, 2011

My wife is from Duluth and her family lives in the St. Paul area, so despite being in the slightly less evilly-wintered Chicago I still manage to find myself in the Cities most winters.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:09 PM on August 17, 2011

Maybe it's just that I am Irish, and genetically programmed to a life without seasons.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:16 PM on August 17, 2011

We may have gone off topic at the end here.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:16 PM on August 17, 2011

SO HOW ABOUT THOSE ARTS
posted by shakespeherian at 1:23 PM on August 17, 2011

They're fine.
posted by griphus at 1:27 PM on August 17, 2011

First thought: as a described gimmick I thought it was pretty meh, but I really like this.

Second thought: someone needs to commission a piece of that Ringu girl climbing out of the well.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 1:43 PM on August 17, 2011

Third thought: I should have him paint a picture of me, using one of those weird smeared photos that I have had taken of me ever since that little girl called me on the telephone.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:57 PM on August 17, 2011