Peter Zimmermann: Painting
Text / Andrea Madesta Director of Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten (MMKK)
Zimmerman's painting represent a medial compositionality. The concept of the image follows the logic of the computer and technology;It's digitally produced,whereas its implementation appears to be hand-made, indeed doubly so：in the shimmering polish and the glowing colors of the surface,a form of artificiality is simulated,which make the motifs in the compositions appear as though prints of a futurist super printer.However ,the opulent,sensual materiality of the surface makes it evident that we are dealing with a computer-generated product. In the intensely colorful,layered,plastic character of the compositions, a quality emerges,which cannot be achieved via digital media.
The technological application of the computer serves the sole purpose as a preparatory instrument, ultimately as a aid to painting.By comparison with photography, network, film or video art, the finished picture is by no means a media art.The production is not by means of a machine but through the hand of the artist who successively apples the colors to the canvas. By stressing this particular, it is by no means a case- as is true of jackson pollock-of turning the subject of the artist in to a fetish. The application of paint is a characteristically skilled enterprise and the structure of the painting reside in the predetermined conception of the stencil shapes. What is more decisive however is the fact that the artistic picture retains its genuine painterly quality through the transference of the digital, computer-generated motif onto the the canvas:the object character of the canvas, the relief-like,almost haptic quality of the surface made up of layers of paint, the specific, intense sheen of epoxy resin the extensive transparency of the iridescent layers of color, as well as their incremental construction. By means of the transference into the realm of painting, the computer images regain the very thing that all images lose when when transferred in to virtual - namely materiality; and that means the material"co-presence" of all pictorial points that distinguish painting and photography from screen images: this friction loss of electronic storage and digitalization is evidently suspended in the case of the tactile object that is a painting. The beautiful image that computer simply cannot bring about remains resplendent as a unique specimen.
The separation of concept and implementation is the prerequisite of a conceptual understanding of art based on "objectivisation" and which renders the artist anonymous to a large extent.The production of subjectively stops being am instrument of social control and becomes directly productive, targeting the construction of consuming -conmmunicating subjects, who are themselves"active". This immaterialisation of production thorough the interplay of computerization and culturalisation creates in the best case new subjectivities and collectives that are able to recognize possibilities for a social practice in the altered situation, which might be more than the mere affirmation of neo-liberal world order. Within the framework of their pictorial strategies, Zimmerman's paintings represent the predominant zeitgeist. Computers and the possibilities inherent in software programs form a common denominator connecting the technically-minded audience with the artist. The consumers of popular visual culture command an essential competence when using media. In today's media society the question is justified as to whether there is such a thing as a "naive" consumer of an image.
The fact that images are manipulated is now generally accepted as a received wisdom. A traditional pictorial concept oriented towards painting could not appropriately represent the potential of the computer image. The release from its social and technical conditions of production elevates the disposability and malleability of the image. What is meant here is not merely digitalized images, bit also images emanating from the psychic order of the imagination. Individuals can identify with these phantasmical images in order to become images themselves, which can be circulated unfettered by the materiality of the body. The experience is immediate in Peter Zimmerman's walk-in, spatial installation.
Computers and the possibilities of software form the basis for design and production of three-dimensional objects. Virtual sculpturing permits the completely free design of a virtual body with virtual tools. The idea of an industrial object is produced in artistic simulation. In the concrete act of looking, this regeneration in turn the impulses of nerve cells of a living subject and thereby produces an aesthetic authenticity. The combination of the hand-made and sampling of sections can also be perceived in a pan-cultural context as a spontaneous open reaction to leaps in technical innovation, which take place with increasing rapidity and in whose wake enormous insecurity is unleashed in society. Evidenced in Peter Zimmerman's artistic practice and duly integrated into his designs are not merely the new technologies and their effects upon artistic production, but also those new conditions of production they engender. Without doubt a lasting shockwave in the understanding of art and thereby the role of the artist has resulted from the development of digital technology and means of communication. Zimmerman's react with all the means of at his disposal within the manifestly unstable relationship between technology and art-with design experiments, which on the one hand pitch the hand-made against the virtual and which transform the immaculately smooth form of digital production into an immaculately smooth mode of painting. His hybrid design concept naturally combines the handcrafted with digital elements- an approach for the future perhaps?
The unique specimen readily stands out against the impersonal. Industrial mass production and artistic quality is assurance in view of permanently changing conditions, which are interpreted anew and differently today - as the definition of a whole generation's position, which self-evidently has recourse to digital technology. Thus we are not essentially dealing with an oppositional attitude to digital processes inspired by handcrafted expertise in the case of this artistic process.On the contrary: the application of the purely handcrafted technique and industrial high-tech processes in Peter Zimmerman's art ultimately to a new hybrid aesthetic.