Digital Divide

Painting in the Age of New Media

Nick Fudge | Andreas Lau | Römer + Römer
Kunstverein Speyer, Germany, 2020

In memory of Andreas Lau

And Yet It Moves

And yet it moves. But towards what?

A distorted world leaves its tracks in the continuous current of media time. Images arrive, circulate and disappear with a lifespan measured in seconds. Their quantity gives them an appearance of overwhelming presence, yet this very abundance threatens to cancel them out. Infinitely reproducible, transportable and divisible, they become simultaneously omnipresent and superfluous.

Then another image must appear: another post, another feed, another stimulus. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter do not simply distribute images; they establish the velocity at which images must now live and die.

Under these conditions, does painting remain necessary? Is it an obsolete container inherited from another order of perception, or does its apparent anachronism allow it to disclose something the digital image conceals?

The digital divide is not simply the division between analogue and digital media. It is a fissure running through our understanding of time, place, matter and presence. The world appears to contract as access expands: we can seemingly be anywhere at any time, yet the more reality is translated into coded signs, the more its texture recedes. We inhabit clouds, streams and virtual environments, while the ground beneath experience becomes increasingly abstract. Things are available everywhere, but present nowhere.

Pixelation and rasterisation can neutralise the visible world, reducing its differences to repeatable units. Yet precisely this apparent neutrality may become artistically productive. Art has never stood outside technical change. Photography was once announced as the end of painting; instead, it displaced painting from certain obligations and forced it to reconsider what an image could be.

Art does not merely reflect the existing world. It introduces resistance into it. It interrupts what has settled into inevitability. It does not need to declare itself avant-garde; it needs only to remain incompatible with the assumption that reality has already been adequately described.

The works of Nick Fudge, Andreas Lau and Römer + Römer arise from this incompatibility. Each asks how painting may absorb, translate or contest the optical and social conditions of new media. Their methods differ substantially, but each treats the digital not as a subject to be illustrated but as a disturbance within perception itself: intuitive and calculated, material and immaterial, seductive and estranging.

The End of Perception?

Andreas Lau

At the centre of Andreas Lau’s work is a deceptively simple question:

What do I really see?

This is not merely a question about visual recognition. It concerns the unstable relation between an image, the history concealed within it, and the assumptions the viewer brings to its surface. What lies behind the depicted person? What has been removed, falsified or misremembered? At what point does seeing become believing?

Lau subjects his images to regular grids, dots, lines and signs. These structures appear at first to interfere with representation, as though a damaged screen or corrupted transmission had been placed between the viewer and the subject. Yet the interference does not merely obscure the image. It exposes the conditions through which an image becomes intelligible.

From a distance, the representation coheres. At close range, it dissolves into painted elements. The ordinary expectation of looking is reversed: physical proximity does not bring greater knowledge. The nearer one approaches, the less securely one sees.

This reversal is fundamental. Lau’s paintings do not conceal an intact image behind a decorative filter. They produce a situation in which recognition and disintegration occupy the same surface. The image becomes visible only by withdrawing from it. Knowledge requires distance.

The motifs often originate in newspapers and archival photographs—images already detached from their first circumstances and recirculated through media. Lau does not restore these images to an imagined original truth. He decomposes them again, translating their photographic structures into egg tempera, points, rectangles and lines. The image is not rescued from mediation; mediation is made material.

In Lovers (The Dance), two figures appear bound together on a dance floor. The immediate reading is romantic: two bodies clinging to one another in exhausted intimacy. Their distorted postures introduce an unease, but the title offers no correction. Only the historical context breaks the image open.

The figures are participants in an American dance marathon of the 1920s, events in which impoverished contestants attempted to remain standing and moving for as long as possible in exchange for money. The couple barely knew one another. Their embrace was not an expression of love, but a method of avoiding collapse.

Once this is known, the painting cannot return to innocence. The same bodies remain visible, but the reality of what is seen has changed. The image has not altered; perception has. Romance becomes exhaustion, devotion becomes economic desperation, and the apparent embrace reveals itself as mutual support under coercive conditions.

The work demonstrates that an image may show us precisely what did not occur. It does not necessarily lie through fabrication. It may lie simply by allowing us to recognise too quickly.

Lau called such works Situations. The term is exact. They are not static representations but unstable encounters between appearance, context and belated knowledge. The viewer sees one image, learns another, and is left between them.

His series Stills turns towards the political manipulation of photographic reality: figures removed from historical records, events rearranged through retouching, absence presented as fact. Trotsky’s erasure from revolutionary photographs is not only an alteration of an image; it is an attempt to make political disappearance operate retroactively, as though the person eliminated from the photograph had never occupied history.

Lau’s paintings slow this violence down. The raster that interrupts perception also prevents the image from passing unquestioned. Looking becomes labour.

His insistence upon the flat, monitor-like surface is equally significant. He avoids spatial illusion because illusion would introduce another layer of deception. Blurring, interference and rasterisation are not stylistic effects applied to a secure image beneath. The picture is already a picture of a picture—a representation whose origin has passed through photography, printing, historical selection and memory before arriving in paint.

Comparisons with Chuck Close or Gerhard Richter may be prompted by superficial optical similarities, but Lau’s question lies elsewhere. His paintings are not primarily demonstrations of photographic translation. They are investigations into the moral and epistemological instability of seeing.

His interest in early photography, archaeology and prehistory intensifies this instability. In a portrait such as Modern Man (Homo sapiens sapiens), digital-looking interference meets an image separated from the present by thousands of years. Geological time and electronic time collapse into one another. The first modern human appears through a visual structure associated with the most recent technologies.

The image does not simply travel through time. Time itself becomes rasterised.

The Loss of Sensibility?

Römer + Römer

Römer + Römer approach new media through an apparently opposite field: collective celebration, sensory excess and spectacular colour.

Their subjects include festivals of youth culture, carnival, nocturnal gatherings and events such as Burning Man. These environments are loud, crowded, illuminated and technically elaborate. They appear to offer an excess of presence: bodies, music, artificial light, costumes, vehicles and temporary architectures gathered into an intensified now.

The artists document these events through thousands of digital photographs. Images are selected, processed on the computer and subsequently translated into oil painting. Yet the paintings are not simply enlarged photographs, nor are they conventional records of social events. The digital source is dismantled and reconstituted through the temporality of painting.

Their images are first conceived pictorially. The event is approached as a structure of colour, light and rhythm rather than as a documentary narrative. At Burning Man, illuminated Art Cars, temporary sculptures and strings of LEDs transform the desert into an unstable field of radiant signs. Individual figures frequently recede into silhouettes or disappear within the collective spectacle.

The digital photograph captures such light almost instantaneously. Painting returns it slowly.

Here the analogy between pixel and painted mark becomes decisive. A pixel or LED diode is translated into a coloured touch made by hand. The relation is not one of simple imitation. The technological unit of light is converted into a material unit of paint. Electronic luminosity becomes pigment; instantaneous capture becomes accumulated duration.

In works such as Electric Cloud, hundreds of small painted marks reconstruct a field of artificial illumination. Seen from a distance, the marks cohere into an almost photographic image. Seen closely, they separate into gestures, intervals and chromatic decisions. The painting oscillates between event and abstraction, description and material surface.

The digital image ordinarily promises speed: immediate capture, immediate review, immediate distribution. Römer + Römer reverse this economy. A moment photographed in a fraction of a second may require months of studio labour. The velocity of the festival is converted into duration.

A productive contradiction emerges. The subject is loud; its making is silent. The festival is collective and ecstatic; the studio process is concentrated and disciplined. The event consumes itself in the present; the painting suspends it.

Their work does not reject digital experience in favour of nostalgic slowness. Instead, it translates one temporal order into another. The painting becomes a device through which the instantaneous image is forced to undergo time.

References to Impressionism, Pointillism and Seurat are unavoidable, but the painted dot now occupies a transformed cultural field. It no longer responds only to optical theories of colour. It also corresponds to the pixel, the LED, the digital photograph and the illuminated surface. A nineteenth-century pictorial atom meets the technological atom of the twenty-first-century image.

The fact that Römer + Römer work as a duo is integral to this structure. Their paintings cannot be referred back to the sovereign hand of a single artist. Individual stylistic dominance must be moderated, negotiated or withdrawn. The painterly subject is distributed between two people.

This shared authorship corresponds to their frequent depiction of crowds and collective events. The single protagonist recedes. Identity becomes dispersed through the group, just as light is dispersed through painted points. Their paintings do not simply represent collective experience; they are themselves produced through a collective negotiation of authorship.

The supposed loss of sensibility under digital conditions is therefore neither accepted nor denied. It is reworked. Sensibility returns not as expressive excess, but as precision: one mark beside another, one decision adjusted through another, until the anonymous light of the technological spectacle acquires a material body.

The Disappearance of the Artist’s Material?

Nick Fudge

Reality Drive is the title of a digital inkjet print by Nick Fudge. More precisely, it is an “ancient” digital print: a work whose development extends from 1994 to its eventual material output in 2015.

The image depicts an American road bordered by signs from which language has disappeared. Direction remains, but destination has been removed. The road promises orientation while leading towards an unspecified elsewhere: a reality drive whose reality cannot be located.

The work also offers an oblique image of the artist’s own history.

Fudge studied at Goldsmiths in London during the 1980s among artists later associated with the Young British Artists. Rather than enter the rapidly expanding art world that formed around this generation, he withdrew. For approximately twenty-five years, his work remained largely unexhibited.

During this period, paintings and digital files accumulated outside public view. His early digital works were stored on removable disks and ageing hardware. As technologies changed, access to them became increasingly uncertain. The works existed, but their existence no longer guaranteed their availability.

The archive entered a peculiar state: neither lost nor fully present. Files remained encoded on physical carriers that contemporary systems could no longer easily read. The supposedly immaterial image was revealed to depend upon highly specific forms of matter—drives, interfaces, operating systems, software versions and machines.

Dematerialisation became another kind of material captivity.

The original text imagines these works as sleeping in a glass computer coffin: visible in principle, inaccessible in practice. The metaphor remains apt. The files did not simply wait passively. Their obsolescence altered them. Errors, incompatibilities and technological discontinuities became part of their condition.

In 2010, Fudge began an expedition into this personal digital past. The artist became the archaeologist of his own media history, recovering works created in early versions of Illustrator and Photoshop and reconstructing the technical environments required to open them.

Media archaeology here is not merely an academic method. It is an autobiographical necessity. The artist excavates not a vanished civilisation, but a vanished technological present—one that had appeared, at the time, to represent the future.

Old files are reopened, translated and developed through newer software. Digital brush marks, painted pixelations and forms of computer abstraction emerge from this recursive process. Commands such as Edit, Undo and Redo become more than tools. They operate as pictorial and temporal principles.

Undo does not simply reverse an action. Redo does not simply restore it. Together they produce an image caught between possible states, a work whose history remains technically active within it. The picture does not proceed towards a single conclusion; it rehearses its own alternatives.

Chance enters through repetition, error, conversion and the uncertain behaviour of old files in new systems. The machine is not treated as a neutral instrument carrying out the artist’s intention. It becomes a second historical agent, capable of delay, resistance and misrecognition.

Fudge’s engagement with Cubism, Picasso, Velázquez and Jasper Johns is therefore not primarily a matter of quotation. Earlier pictorial systems are re-encountered through digital logic. Cubist fragmentation, layered viewpoints and signs detach themselves from their historical period and reappear as unexpected anticipations of screen space, vector construction and editable image states.

It can seem as though the older paintings somehow knew about the digital image before it existed. More precisely, the later technology reveals structures within them that had previously remained latent.

Fudge’s return to oil painting does not represent a retreat from digital work. The paintings establish another condition of visibility. They possess weight, surface and physical presence; they can be encountered without first recovering a lost operating system.

Yet this material certainty is deceptive. The digital works demonstrate that matter has not disappeared. It has changed its address. A dataset is not immaterial: it is distributed across code, storage media, software and the conditions of access. A digital work may be present as information while remaining absent as experience.

Many of Fudge’s works have no definitive output. They remain editable, revisable and capable of disappearing into another state. The final image is replaced by a suspended sequence of possible versions.

The exhibition therefore presents images that, in a strict technological sense, should perhaps no longer exist. They have survived their original machines, software and formats. Their visibility is already an improbable event.

In an age defined by excessive image production, these works ask for the opposite response: not another glance, but sustained attention. They demand that one look at what has survived the very technologies that promised unlimited reproduction.

Against Speed, For Duration

Three artistic positions. At first, an unlikely conjunction.

Andreas Lau interrupts recognition until seeing becomes uncertain. Römer + Römer translate instantaneous digital capture into the prolonged labour of painting. Nick Fudge allows digital works to remain suspended for decades before they acquire—or recover—a material form.

Their common ground is not a shared style. It is a shared transformation of time.

Each refuses the image’s demand to be consumed immediately. Lau makes perception hesitate. Römer + Römer make the moment endure. Fudge makes the file wait.

This is more than a general call for slowness. Slowness can itself become a style, another cultural preference consumed at speed. These works instead construct duration as a critical medium. They make time palpable by obstructing the smooth passage from image to recognition.

Painting is not defended here as a traditional refuge from technology. It is used as an instrument for discovering what technology does to reality. It reveals that the digital image has a body, that a photograph contains unseen histories, that a pixel can become a brushstroke, and that an obsolete file may possess a longer life than the machine designed to contain it.

The digital divide thus runs neither cleanly between painting and new media nor between past and present. It passes through each work. It divides the image from its history, perception from knowledge, data from access, speed from duration and appearance from the reality it claims to deliver.

The three artists do not resolve this division. They inhabit it.

The original text ends with an invitation to drift within the data stream, but to remain there longer than the stream permits: not a residence time of seconds, but of hours. This may be the exhibition’s quiet proposition. One can enter the current without surrendering to its velocity. One can remain within the image until its surface begins to contradict itself.

And yet it moves.

The question Andreas Lau placed before the visible world remains:

What do I really see?

A work that keeps this question open does not conclude with the life of its maker. It continues to alter the perception of those who stand before it.