The illusion of certainty: When form shifts,
does meaning disperse?
Ingo Gerckens is known for his painting, which goes beyond traditional materials and connects different media. His working process involves constant shifts between mediums, translations into new materialities and repeated re-samplings. In doing so he expands the discussion about the significance of panel painting in the digital age.
Two key concepts are important in this context: Slow Painting and the so-called Dark Age of Information. In this era panel painting gains new relevance.
Gerckens raises fundamental questions: Where does form create context? Where does it dissolve when transferred into another medium?
How can panel painting assert itself in a world dominated by moving images? His work directly engages with this challenge. He explores whether panel painting can still retain meaning in an era of visual overload. At what point does an image lose its recognizable subject? When does it become so abstract that it can no longer be put into words?
The tools we employ – be it brush, camera, or AI
– merely generate surfaces. The essence remains ultimately unseen.
New media, social networks and artificial intelligence are changing how we see, understand and interpret. The speed of these developments is increasing rapidly.
As a result it becomes harder to maintain a fixed perspective. Our minds must constantly adapt to process the flood of visual information.
This rapid transformation is the starting point for Ingo Gerckens’ work. He examines when an image loses its meaning, when it escapes language and when we are left simply looking without understanding. How do we cope when we can no longer name what we see?