Das eiskalte Wasser egoistischer Berechnung

Gaspar Willmann develops a practice that combines video, painting and installation. From personal photographs, images gathered online and editing software, he composed pieces where the images slide from the screen to the canvas. Montage, deviation, and reworking become tools for reflecting on how images are constructed and acquire an emotional load. At gr_und, the video Glass House is presented behind a long series of paintings fixed onto plasterboard railings. Both ensembles stem from the same process of assembling images, yet they give rise to two noticeably different experiences. The video unfolds a universe crossed by a continuous flow of shifting, alienating images, while the painting offers a more tranquil counterpoint, where the gaze finds time to rest. Glass House draws loose inspiration from a film project conceived by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the early 1930s. Existing only as a scenario, it presents an entirely transparent architecture in which all forms of privacy seem destined to vanish. Gaspar Willmann adopts this concept to construct an environment where a character, confined to their apartment, moves amidst glass surfaces and multiple layers of imagery. Overlays, editing effects, and plays on transparency, shape a narrative that draws as much from melodrama as from the conventions of science-fiction cinema. Within it, digital technologies progressively blur the boundaries between domestic space, digital space, and private life. The paintings originate from digital compositions created on a computer. Photographs taken from the artist's daily life, screenshots, and images gathered online or from stock libraries, are gradually assembled and layered until their sources become difficult to identify. Printed on canvas, these compositions are then reworked with oil paint, which extends their effects rather than hiding the creative process. Windows, corridors, flowers, cigarette butts, and meal leftovers appear from one painting to the next. These ordinary fragments mix together with effects of blur and depth that recall both digital editing tools and techniques from classical painting. The images oscillate between personal memory and generic iconography. They seem to remain in a state of constant transformation, as if multiple states of the same image continued to coexist. As images move from screen to canvas, their mode of engagement shifts. Removed from the rhythm of their circulation, they invite a slower way of looking. The exhibition thus outlines alternative ways of navigating the technologies that shape our daily lives. Countering the logic of acceleration and calculation, the works restore a place for fragility, unhurried time, and ordinary experience. Painting seeks not to dispel this complexity, but to make tangible what the digital stream tends to compress.