Gero Gries

The pictures Gero Gries has generated on the computer during recent years depict rooms and are therefore connected to the interior as an artistic genre. His portrayals of rooms are based on the combination of his own knowledge through experience, that is, of images before his inner eye compounded of what he has personally experienced, and reproductions he has seen. Transferred onto the 3D programme of his Apple-Macintosh and worked out using the rendering programme he prefers, they culminate in data which are then transferred onto large-format photo-paper in a professional laboratory. All his views of rooms are astonishing in their clarity, wealth of light and – without exception – their emptiness of people. Developed from care and carelessness, as Gero Gries puts it himself, this state of emptiness reflects his efforts to track down the essential. Reduction of form is one of his means.

The way in which creative possibilities alter with the computer (and this is demonstrated in an exemplary way by the exceptional formal aesthetic qualities of camera-less digital images), is made clear by a work in which Gero Gries deviated from the idea of pure fantasy rooms otherwise valid for his pictures. Attracted by its affinity to his own portrayals of rooms, he permitted himself to be inspired by a study by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, which was painted in 1906. Interiors by this painter, which constituted a large part of his œuvre thematically, also draw their power of attrac-tion from the magic exuded by the rooms. Since people appear only seldom, on the one hand these works convey something claustrophobic, they have an appeal to loneliness. On the other hand, they are highly effective as a result of their mysterious treatment of light. A window permeated by light and a closed door next to it are remarkable; they reflect the artist’s way of working and thinking in an exemplary

fashion. Using an artistic model in this case, Gero Gries works as artists have done in a long tradition before him; they have always taken over works by older or dead artist colleagues with respect to motif or theme, then altered them by employing their own, personal styles. Whilst Hammershøi breaks the room’s atmosphere of depressing closure and its presumed lack of escape by means of the sun-shine falling into it, articulating this with painterly accuracy, Gero Gries chooses the same arrangement, but in a version whose style is polished and smooth, yet no less emotionally charged, as is indicated by the treatment of light alone.

The way in which Gero Gries resolves the particular aesthetic features of digital image production by comparison to conventional painting in this interior is bound up with aesthetic self-reassurance and with his working method in general. In

a similar way to the painter, who aims to coax the full appeal from his paints, Gero Gries plays through all his possibilities on the computer. This alternating relation led to images of swimming pools with reflecting tiles and water surfaces, of a bathroom, of chairs made out of plastic, or of a refrigerator with its familiar smooth surfaces. Aspects of reflection, naturally connected to the arrangement of light, permit us to recognize other motifs in which reflections come to the fore. Combined with the selection of diverse textures for surfaces, Gero Gries completely sounds out the technological possibilities of his programmes and so achieves images of a clarity which would be impossible in analogous photography, even with the most perfect installations. By this means he arrives at pictorial effects beyond painterly or photographic perfection, not as the result of the computer, but of his creative handling and aesthetic pretensions.

Enno Kaufhold

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