Michael Zahn

Untitled (Palette with Objects), 2002

Since 1994, Michael Zahn has been working on painterly translations of computer software’s visible symbolic metaphors. Familiar icons are transformed into objects of a minimalist bent, markedly expressed in abstract pictorial terms. His large-scale depictions of windows, menus, and process bars hover in isolation in front of the wall, and the surface of the virtual desktop is rearticulated as the paintings take on a ‘two and a half’ dimensional quality within given architectural structures. Colors applied by means of housepainter’s rollers develop a heightened tactile plasticity that brusquely rejects any ‘empathetic’ contemplation. Untitled (Palette with Objects) is a three-panel work, one represents the color palette of a graphics program. The color palette is not, however, a ready-made, but is an interpretation of an artist’s palette rendered in terms of color. For instance, the most delicate shades of white and beige in the uppermost row are followed by the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, punctuated by gray and green interruptions. The paintings confront the onlooker with an abstract structure of the computer screen. In the process of perception, this structure has to be ‘downloaded’ with individual user applications that are reconfigured in personal terms.