The unbroken desire for a regressive correction of the found reality proves to be a strategic constant of painting. This is followed by a return to the essential, to the artificial manipulation of today's experience of nature, the unconscious, the utopia of nothingness. Whimsicality becomes the preferred consumer attitude. Karl Marx declared commodity fetishism to be the attractive ability of a product that is able to interest us beyond its use value or exchange value through the metaphorical belief that is reciprocated. The suggestion of security and its destruction form an indispensable and at the same time profitable business in the world of computer and animated games.
Some may find the works of Ellen Semen frightening. This artist not only seems to have mastered the magic of all technical painterly means, but also drastically demonstrates that most states and utopias ultimately owe their creation to childish play. In dealing with images, no spectacle of narcissistic mirroring is witnessed here. Nevertheless, culture is and remains conceptual in Ellen Semen's paintings. The canvas, the material, the palette are the playground of gigantic horror scenarios as a synonym for chaos and violence in real everyday experiences.
The attacks of a politically aggressive and technically perfect artist who does not bow to the usual conventions of the market. The dangerously banal turn of merely surrendering to provocation is averted in time. The traditional forms of expression of a beautiful, ideal world are put to rest. The meeting of protagonists from various computer and animation games forms a reductio ad absurdum in the endgame and radiates a vibrant energy and cartoon-like vitality.
Ellen Semen's images carry the sober luminosity of an enlightenment, whose polished surface and glistening reflections glide over into an absurd universe. The explicitly staged and fictional character of the arrangement conceals its narrative humor where the staging of the imagination tips over into the realm of horror. Thus one encounters allegorical figurative painting that creates iconographic signs of the computer age under the historical conditions of a representation of representation. No hint of gesturalism or other openly designed arguments of the painterly emerge. The social presence of a contemporary ambivalence of a supra-personalized desire penetrates to the surface through alienation processes and the equal treatment of different pictorial resources. Ellen Semen inserts an anonymous image of mass culture into combination fields of a shrill encounter. A suggestive rhetoric of evidence is put to rest under a reversed sign.
Ellen Semen's pictures fit in with a media critique that warns of the horror of a society ready for war. In her current pictures, Ellen Semen addresses the permanent mass cultural mobilization of war. We have long been fighting the permanent battle on all possible fronts. The state of war and mass culture permeate each other, as can be seen in computer games. The balancing act between a catastrophic visual language and extremely sensualist painting is inscribed in the images. According to Tom Holert and Mark Teressidi's publication 'Entsichert. War as Mass Culture in the 21st Century', mobility and self-realization can already be regarded as warlike norms.
The Apocalpyse Now and Killerkid symptoms are a fatal side effect of any pseudo-normality. The calls and invocations of a warlike mass culture are detected as omnipresent. The perception of compound non-places is followed by the eclat. The warlike conjunctions generate new subject-pyenas that internalize their imperatives. A flowing war continuum goes hand in hand with athletic fitness, economic careerism and provokes a culture of fear with a tendency towards paranoid connections. The fluid subjectivity of Ellen Semen's images have one thing in common, namely that they involve the fictional in a lively fluctuation between appearance and disappearance.
Sexually attractive manga characters and Pokemon populate the pictures. As is usual in Japanese animated films, Ellen Semen takes up the topos of the ghost in the machine, which relates the age of computer and animation technology to an electronic omnipresence from the perspective of the Netwar. In the 80s cult film Blade Runner, the horror vision of a connection between man and machine is already intensified to the extent that the boundaries between man and robot are dissolved and the protagonists mutate into beings with hyper-speed. What remains of the human subject, which dissolves in the pure flow of information, is an impulse of time and movement, a boundless art of being in the form of post-modern science fiction and cyberpunk. The manga comic and its animated film variant animé are now also extremely popular with cyberspace freaks in Europe. The penchant for the action girl and her raw, expressive sexuality are also present in Ellen Semen's pictures. But what are the political consequences and how does this relax the attitude of an object status of female sexuality?
The transformation of the protagonists into fighting machines causes the naive youthful character to fade and their innocence to turn into demons of fire and steel. The Japanese cult film Ghost in the Shell is a successful example of this increasingly fast-paced genre. It tells the story of a female replicate who embodies the dual role of detective and wanted man. In Ellen Semen's images, the trace of a bubbling doubt causes the eye to scan a space in which life seems both adventurous and risky. Based on this, a dialectic of conquest and dispossession resonates in the images.
There is the prismatic space, a tangled web of grasses, a manga figure ready to fight between harmless sheep, a weapon lights up in a flash and is lost in a fleeting movement that forces the viewer to look. In the picture 'Viel Grün um Nichts', the semantic shift in the title changes the function of the syntax and frees it for denotative use. Ellen Semen permutates her images through amusing phrasing. At the same time, she picks up on her sign systems and is able to locate a historical dimension behind their playfulness. Ellen Semen succeeds in getting a grip on these by recycling and re-signifying them, by shifting their significant aspects. The formal recognition of its inherent intertextuality presupposes that this use of signs in an artistic context is an aesthetic one.
Whether a deconstructive way of reading painting can be discovered here, thereby propagating images that slip between media and genres, needs to be clarified. Ellen Semen's paintings most clearly indicate that they owe their creation to what Michael Wetzel describes as their materiality and codes in his book 'Die Wahrheit nach der Malerei'. Thus Ellen Semen's painting is conceptually overlaid by media such as computer animation. This is the most vivid way to understand how the aesthetic paradigm of painting has been overturned and how it can be experienced through its materiality from the supposed tension between computer animation and painting. The contract between image and reality is intertwined in its fragility. It still resonates that painting never serves to reproduce reality, but to transform it. This can be seen most clearly in the way representation has been replaced by information in painting. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan proclaimed, painting cannot be abolished by a new medium, but can increasingly be characterized as a structural carrier of signs.
What now manifests itself as an uprising of signs gives a sense of the morbid taste of death mixed with the spectacular. It is possible to hypothesize that the media's travesty of violence masks the disgust of this cultural paralysis. The found simultaneity of simulation models is the trigger for a mega-flash. The reaction against the immoral fascination of war games and their theater of cruelty is a collective defense of every seduction. Their unstable experimental matrix is put into a compositional order.
Another phantasm of synthesis and defence detaches itself from the penetrating power. Despite its worldwide effect, there is no innocence in this system. The protagonists follow the bursts of fire from special commandos and seem to defy the sacred alliance of every production of truth, paradoxically setting in motion the cycle that brings about a recycling of truth against the indissoluble cycle of death. At the same time, the dimension of an occupation, networking and erosion of sociality through signs comes into play here. The image thus becomes a polygon of signs and media - a coded decoder of countless messages. Today, socialization, or rather de-socialization, takes place via this structural ventilation across the codes. The interchangeability of the elements as radical revolts allows us to immerse ourselves in a reality that is nothing but virulent animation - the simulacrum of an appeal.