PERSONAL STRUCTURES - IDENTITIES
European Cultural Center / Venice 2019 Art Biennale

Catalogues Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, European Cultural Center / Venice 2019 Art Biennale
Edited and published by European Cultural Centre
602 Seiten, ISBN 978-90-829434-5-0

Catalogue online / Beitrag "Beschleunigte Kunst" auf Seite 382

Hans Christian Ohl
Accelerated Art

My artwork are paintings with virtual paint and digital paintbrushes. Based on digital photos of mostly everage sujets I edit the pictures on the computer: destroying and cutting, putting them together, using distortions, layers, overlaps and other digital interventions.

I am using digitized photographs as color pots. Doing so I reverse the painting process: I don ́t create a picture with paint, but elaborate photographic image in a reverse process back to color and structure.

Photographs are a shadow of reality. If this shadow is digitized, it lea- ves only a mere arithmetic operation, a reality of zeroes and ones. It shrinks to a virtual shadow and is simultaneously accelerated to a high-tech reality.

“Acceleration” refers not only to moving matter, e.g. the body racing through a landscape in a car and the eye involuntarily drawn towards the horizon, eluding the obvious and details.
An increasingly complex social processes like the dissolution of space and time in technical communication processes, when, for example, a person talks to another person who is in a completely different place.

For the “accelerated person” it is getting difficult to distinguish bet- ween reality and virtual reality. The dividing lines blur. Every look at the environment is overlaid by endless layers of virtual image snippets.

The image on our mind, that is, the image behind our eyes, builds up completely different to the image of a camera. It is composed of snapshots of different situations and times, wich overlay the retina ́s perception with moods and feelings, creating a very complex but al- ways subjective image.

Due to technical possibilites of digital printing on various materials in unlimited sizes I can create large scale installations in buildings. These „accelerated worlds“ are based on images of daily life such as consu- me products, environment, people, plants. Compositions of various details being processed to digital paintings they und fold to worlds of their own, wich cannot easily be deciphered and decoded at the first sight.