"As You Wish" - PUNTA Gallery

Featured in this exhibition are paintings watermarked with their captions. But unlike a painting of a horse, being captioned as a door*, Paul Riedmueller’s captions are blunt and factual. They include the title, the artist, the year, the medium, and the dimensions of the painting. There is no treachery in the delivery of the message. The message itself is not in the painting or the metadata that is embedded in the painting - the point is that they exist together. In a world oversaturated with content, Paul Riedmueller’s paintings manage to slow down our gaze. This text explores the processes that are key to understanding how his paintings respond to digital culture, not by rejecting it, but by absorbing its strange logic and translating it into something that feels noticeably human again.

  Accompanying a photo in an article about the Danube River on the website visitingvienna.com is the caption: “The Danube where it enters Vienna, and annoyingly not blue for the photo”. The photo is, as it says, of the river, annoyingly not blue. One common method of training AI is based on feeding the model images paired with human-generated captions. This training process is designed to teach computers to understand the relationships between our language and the visual elements in images. What color does a computer register as “annoyingly not blue”**? The process of labeling the datasets was done by humans, under the guise that we need to prove we are not robots by solving the CAPTCHA by clicking on traffic lights, or taken from the alt-text written by social media users to help the visually impaired or from the hashtags that label photos in an attempt to improve audience reach. These internet user-generated datasets are now used as examples that allow us to use AI to generate images by using only words. There is a wish-fulfilment quality in using these tools; you write something down and suddenly it appears out of thin air, almost like magic, almost like casting a spell. In the context of the show, this is important because AI was used to generate some of the images that Paul Riedmueller used as references for his paintings. Тransforming language into generative art is a current touchy topic, especially for artists, because of ethical concerns about breach of copyright and the potential ecological impact. This invocation of art from a computer sometimes follows an uncanny logic, leading to some visual abominations. We are still a long way from total responsiveness of these AI tools, complicated not only by technical limitations but by the abstract, ambiguous nature of language itself. Тhe artistic intuition of Paul shines exactly in this - that he can ’wish’  for images that most people will consider slop***, and in his process of interpretation elevate them through the act of painting. The process of transforming them from concept to pixels to paint becomes a statement about his human artistic agency itself.

   When I was young, I used to visit my grandparents' house for the summer; often, the electricity would cut out for hours at a time, but there was this radio with only one station that was not affected by the lack of electricity in the house. On a program called Horizon, a voice would read the hydrological bulletin addressing all the changes in the water level of the Danube River. In what felt like hours, a voice listed a string of names of cities located alongside the riverbank, accompanied by the numeric value indicating the change of the water level in centimeters. First in Bulgarian, next in Russian, and finally in French. The mind-blowingly dry delivery of raw data led me to seek other forms of media entertainment. I had to read a book that was called something in the vein of “101 interesting facts“. To be honest, I can’t recall either the proper title of the book or the name of the author. The “facts” were mostly one sentence long, one of them was “Horses can sleep standing up”. This was the pre-Google era, so I did not have a way to verify it. It did not even occur to me to use the empirical method and observe my grandfather's mule****, which slept regularly lying down, even sometimes on his back, no more than 100 meters away from our house. Many years later, I found out that horses can enter the non-rapid eye movement phase of sleep standing, but in order to reach the REM phase, they absolutely need to lie down. Depriving the horses of the ability to lie down during sleep and preventing them from reaching the rapid eye movement phase can lead to the development of neurological and behavioral disorders. In this case, the small gap between a half-fact and the full picture produces real implications. In the past, our limited understanding of our reality led to the creation of new myths. The gaps in knowledge did not just create new stories, but made new systems of meaning built on what we did not know. Today, something similar is happening with AI. The limited data, combined with limited understanding and surface-level associations, can give rise to something entirely new that becomes the foundation for fictional visuals that look convincingly real but have never existed. AI doesn’t reproduce reality; it hallucinates a new version of it. While Paul’s paintings are meticulously crafted by hand and do exist in the real world, they still occupy a space and logic that would perfectly fit in a dream or a hallucination; they often hover between almost real and completely made up. 

Scientists have found that during REM sleep, our brain activity nearly mirrors that of the nonsleeping mind. The only difference is that the input is not coming from the outside world, but it is internally generated. The mind conjures images held together by logic that seem real when sleeping, but are completely absurd when awake. Paul's paintings, at first glance, look real, but the longer you look, the more their dreamlike logic becomes obvious. His paintings have this post-digital surrealistic feel that doesn't take inspiration from dreams or the subconscious mind, but still inhabits a similar space. The images he carefully selects as his subject matter come pre-warped with this dreamlike logic, shaped by machine vision and the sheer strangeness of the found online visual materials. And this is another area where he shines as a curator of the source images, because he delves into more obscure internet aesthetics, which are often overlooked as visual junk. To everyone who is a regular internet user, the images will look recognizable, but Riedmueller doesn't resort to using memes or culturally significant images to grab the audience's attention instantly. He chooses the most aura-deprived stock photo clip art and manages to elevate it to something worth looking at. It is a well-known fact that the band R.E.M.  named themselves after the dream phase, but when the sleep scientist William Dement (who coined the term) asked about the name, they claimed they just picked the word at random from a dictionary. This dadaistic act of taking the term from the dictionary did not change the word from a scientific term to a band name. When Paul works with appropriated images he finds online, he strips them of their original contexts and authorship. But at the same time, he shines a spotlight on images most people would consider disposable and forgettable. In the past, being represented realistically in a painting on canvas was something only the rich and powerful were able to afford. But now, Paul gives this honor to untextured 3D renders and overlooked PNG files. Allowing us to reperceive images we have never seen.




*René Magritte. La Clef des Songes (The Interpretation of Dreams). Brussels, 1935

** This was meant as a rhetorical question, but I did ask some of the popular large language models to assign a hex value to “annoyingly not blue”. ChatGPT #00FFFF, Grok #CACA00, and Gemini #666699

***"AI slop", often simply "slop", is a term for low-quality media, including writing and images, made using generative artificial intelligence technology, characterized by an inherent lack of effort, logic, or purpose.

**** I know mules are only half horses.