Token 2006 / 2007

Tracing the Essential

Gero Gries has dedicated himself completely to artistic creation on the computer. His precisely executed large-format interiors and portraits are highly stylized for purposes of idealized exaggeration. His computer-generated images show, among other things, interior spaces and thus continue the artistic genre of the interior. His pictures are based on the combination of his own experience or events and reflect his creative effort to trace the essential.

Gero Gries carefully and meticulously thinks over every detail down to the individual pixel, but as he says himself, prepares the images just as carelessly. Gero Gries is one of those artists who considers computer-supported image production a continuation of painting, via another medium. His pictures suppose photorealism, but would be unattainable using conventional tools of photography. He creates his pictures himself (using the design possibilities of constantly changing computer technology), so they are actually more closely related to painting than photography. This is also a peculiarity of his way of working, something that becomes all the more evident through his choice of subjects, which broadly conform to traditional genres of art.

By taking up and, in part, adopting art historical genres and motifs, Gero Gries follows in a long tradition of artists through all periods who reflect the work of predecessors thematically and in motif. Like Vermeer, for example, sunlight streaming in breaks through the oppressive mood of a closed room. Gero Gries chooses a similar arrangement to express this effect with painterly accuracy, but in his own style of formed, smooth, but no less emotional transmission, characterized by a hyperrealistic depiction of surfaces and precise illumination.

For the representation of different surface textures Gero Gries applies the technical possibilities of his software thereby achieving images of a clarity that would be unattainable with analogue photography even with the most sophisticated installations. Herein lies the aesthetic uniqueness of Gero Gries’ work.

Text: Ulrike Pennewitz
Source: www.portalkunstgeschichte.de