Reality Drive is a digital inkjet print created by British artist Nick Fudge in 1994 using Adobe software, although it was not printed until 2015, giving the work a date range of the work as 1994-2015. This and other extended date ranges are common in Fudge's work. After destroying his Goldsmiths paintings in 1988, Fudge abandoned painting and turned to new graphics software from Adobe and Fractal Design on Apple Macintosh computers to create his digital 'paintings'. Reality Drive depicts an empty European country road with unmarked signs and represents the dissolution and disappearance of the materiality of things. Fudge's interest in exploring a modern pictorial language capable of allegorizing the dematerialization and disappearance of form in painting led him to create a personal archive of digital works entitled Digital Boîte-en-valise, reproducing lost or destroyed paintings, constructions, and drawings in digital format. Another series,  Problem of Picasso, branches out into themes such as difference and repetition, algorithmic design, digital painting, digital materialism, media archaeology, and, more recently, AR, AI and ML.

In the 1990s, Fudge practised as a post-studio artist, driving across America, stashing and dumping everything he made on external hard drives. His self-imposed reticence over two decades meant that the fate of most of his work remained unclear, and future exhibitions had the potential to be purely retrospective. Fudge's personal archive is almost inaccessible, and his current work remains hidden. He recalled his American motifs of sublime deserts, ghost towns, and deserted land in retrospective artworks printed on various materials such as stainless steel, acrylic, vinyl, and canvas, entitled Palo Alto, Monument Valley, and Yellowstone.

In 2011 Fudge returned to traditional media, exploring new methods and techniques of painterly digitization, refining a digital color palette, and applying the principle of chance and spontaneity to his painting practice. He juxtaposes expressive gestural brushwork with stenciled computer input commands such as 'edit', 'undo', 'redo', 'escape', and 'delete', suggesting machine-made art. Fudge has alluded to the influence of absurd commands found in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Fudge's art often hides the hand that made it, such as his complex vector images that appear to be machine-generated screenshots, but are in fact meticulously constructed by hand. Conversely, his paintings, when viewed digitally, reveal the stenciled computer input commands, reinforcing the idea of a machine-made art. Fudge's oeuvre is complex and difficult for the layman to understand, with external influences that are seemingly random, but his works offer a unique perspective on the dematerialization of form in painting.

Andreas Lau's work is very much concerned with the question: What am I really seeing? What is behind the person being portrayed? What's real?

To explore this theme, he filters and dissects the pictorial surfaces of his canvases with uniform grids, signs and dots, until the viewer can literally no longer 'see through' the matrix. The viewer is forced to ask these very questions.

"... The encryption of the theme is done through a kind of filter that he puts on the events and on the one hand holds together, on the other hand, but also destroyed. Lau finds his motives when leafing through newspapers. Interesting images with special contexts are cut out and collected... By imitating the existing structures with points, rectangles or lines in egg tempera he breaks the picture into signs... This creates an objectivity in the two-dimensionality, which gives the impression in some works that the faces bulge out of the ground. The physical approach of the viewer to a painting is actually intended to recognize more. The dissolution of the representation into pure pictorial means creates an opposite effect for Andreas Lau's works. Only from a distance can one make out what is represented, in the near-vision it begins to flicker before the eyes. " 

(Tessa Rosebrock MA Kunsthalle Karlsruhe /" Schicht / Sicht "Painting Andreas Lau p.56 / Modo-Verlag)

Can we really decipher what we see? Do we understand the stories behind the images? Clearly "no".

Pictures have been forged thousands of times. In the past and with great effort. Now forgeries are made with fast digital precision. Hardly recognizable as manipulation. As a forgery. As a weapon.

Digitization as a technology does not make the world safer. It is becoming a more dangerous place. It has little to do with truth and "perception"!

When Lau paints a tight-laced couple on a dance floor, one usually thinks of the depiction of two lovers. Both are clinging to each other in seemingly intimate devotion. Only the strangely contorted postures betray a certain disagreement. Something is not quite right. But what is it? Even the title of the work offers no explanation: "Lovers (The Dance)". That's exactly what you're supposed to see. Lau's technique of painting a linear screen-effect he creates a visual disturbance field that alters the impression. As a result of his method, the image begins to oscillate and to question itself. Viewed at close range the viewer even loses sight of the subject. What do you really see? What is behind those hanging, limp bodies? They are a 'dancing couple' from a dance marathon in the USA in the 1920s. Penniless people could earn money by dancing as long as possible without falling asleep. For a few dollars. No romance. No love. The viewer of the dancing couple sees what she wants to see, not reality. By learning the harsh reality of the dancing couple, the image is permanently altered so that the viewer can never see it as it was before. A seemingly innocent scene that contains an opposite reality. Lau calls such ambiguous images "situations".

Römer + Römer have a very different approach to the term 'new media' which is reflected in their primary interest in youthful, alternative and temporary communities; political protests, public demonstrations, music festivals, or popular cultural events such as the colourful carnival in Rio are all subjects for this artist couple's visually playful, loud, colourful and digitised paintings. A feast for the senses!

Römer + Römer attend each of their carefully selected public events and popular gatherings, documenting them subjectively but accurately, and capturing them in thousands of digital photographs. Suitable subjects suitable are selected, edited on the computer and finally transformed into oil paintings. The artists are chroniclers of our times and of a certain way of life: the celebration of the night, the colors of celebration of of protest, large crowds gathered together to celebrate music, rhythm , dance and, ultimately, the mystery of life. This is particularly evident in their new series of paintings documenting the annual Burning Man festival in the American Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

"What began modestly in 1986 as a personal healing ritual organized by Larry Harvey (1948-2018) with 20 attendees at Baker Beach in San Francisco has today become a cultural phenomenon of epic grandeur, with diverse rituals, fine art and performance. Every year, every week before Labor Day, some 70,000 people visit the salt flats of glacial Lake Lahontan in the Black Rock Desert in northwest Nevada. "(Rachel Bowditch / Römer + Römer Burning Man - Electric Sky / Kerber Verlag p. 7) 

Römer + Römer initially think about their paintings in a purely painterly way and select them according to these formal criteria. Their theme is that time is essentially here and now. There is no past. Everything is present. A night flooded with colourful lights, digitalised connections and abstract color structures that coalesce into a painting of so-called 'mutant vehicles', customised art cars at Burning Man, an event that is strikingly reminiscent of Mad Max films. It is not so much the event itself that is depicted, but the unique optical pyroclastic effects of electronic and digitised lights that illuminate the desert at night. The main formal and pictorial theme for Römer + Römer is the depiction of the sea of ​​light and color in all its facets and nuances; through their digitised painting technique the depiction of Burning Man revelers and 'mutant vehicles' disappears into abstraction; there are hardly any recognizable people, they are almost invisible, perceptible at most as outlines. The festival's cascades of digital fairy lights suggested to the artists the pixelation of images and the possibile deconstruction of motifs and signs. Their painting is concrete, recognisable but ultimately unreadable.

"Translated into painting, however, the analogy of pixel and single LED diode translates into another: the one between the painted color dot and the LED light, which it represents as a motif."

(Ludwig Seyfarth / Römer + Römer Burning Man - Electric Sky / Kerber Verlag p.5)