rgroves – Looking Outwards 05

      

      

Richard Kolker’s series “Reference, Referents” reverses that convention of using photograph as references for paintings. Instead, he takes famous paintings and uses 3D digital modeling techniques to create synthetic photographs of what the original painters may have been looking at. This project is interesting because it asks the question – if an image is indistinguishable from a photograph, does that make it a photograph? His images are every bit as fabricated as the paintings he’s inspired by, but they are meant to look like reference material.

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I particularly liked how he rendered Lazlo Maholy-Nagy’s A19, which is not a representational artwork and one would not assume that artist originally worked with a photograph. Kolker’s interpretation of the stripes as ribbons and the discolored area as a spotlight made me see the original work in a totally different way.

http://www.richardkolker.com/refref.htm