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ARTIFICAL_GODS_Eurydike.


In earlier days, the world was one big fat coherent thing that made sense.  Then  modernity came and blew it all to pieces. Now Dennis Rudolph comes along and puts it back  together again. The abstract painting, robbed of its object by Modernism a hundred years  ago, is no longer abstract, but turns out to be part of a larger whole that we only see when  we use our phones. The oil painting no longer sits on the wall in sad isolation, but blends  into a vast virtual landscape that includes  every painting ever made. In turn, virtual  reality is no longer a free-floating fantasy  world, but connects to our physical realm as Dennis Rudolph anchors it on the million-ton  pillars of five millenia of mythology. And our  smartphones are no longer just the addiction  machines we spend hours and years and lives glued to, but become part of the art. 
The automatic action that we’ve conditioned  ourselves to perform – pull phones out and  take pictures – turns us into accomplices of  the artwork, thus stopping us from performing that exact automatic action (raise phones and take pictures). Dennis Rudolph makes us  executors of a mankind that's done with its  own history and wants to invent new worlds, but can’t help only ever looking back. He  exposes us our entanglement, but also makes  us step out of it and look at ourselves. We  are Orpheus, who could transform the world  with a song, and our cultureal history is  Eurydice, who unfortunately died, but we  brought her back from the land of the Dead, still we’re not allowed to turn around and look at her. Dennis Rudolph forces us to act like  Orpheus, look back, and watch as the gods  that we created drag our undead love back to  the underworld – this time, forever. 

-Dietrich Brüggemann, 11.2.2021