One could think of David Czupryn’s images as painted illusions or surreal constructs that follow their own inner logic. But I’m not sure it’s enough to draw on well-worn terms from the history of painting like “trompe l’oeil” or “Surrealism” if one wants to explain the specificity of his work. Instead, when I stand in front of his canvases, I have the need to move past those familiar terms and feel out a phenomenon that I might provisionally describe as a synthesis between classical painting and the digital realm, between the canvas and the user interface. There’s already a term for it on Wikipedia: “digitality.” In German, it’s a portmanteau of “digital” and “materiality”; in English, it has the epochal undertones of “modernity” and “post-modernity.” For me, it also conjures the word “dignity,” if only by way of rhyme. Following this line of thought, the intersection of the analog and digital could thus be a way of dignifying a subject that draws on the relevant means of representing the present from each way of relating to reality; and it’s precisely these means of representation that make the present—specifically saturated as it is with life—worthy of being perceived as something of artistic value. I arrived at this idea while looking at the painting Coups de Bâtons (1937) by the Greek-French artist Antoine Malliarakis, otherwise known as Mayo, who was born in Egypt. Czupryn produced an elaborate adaptation of the image in 2018 under the title Baton Blows. But one only needs to consider the painting’s dimensions—it measures an impressive 260 by 360 centimeters—to realize that Czupryn isn’t just doing a Czerny-style study with his brush. His adaptation is a kind of program in itself, and it’s precisely its visible, minor deviations from the original that reveal this virtuoso, yet unconventional painter’s strategy. David Czupryn was born in 1983 and first trained as a carpenter before he studied sculpture and painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This particular biographical detail seems relevant, since his early familiarity with technical craftsmanship is reflected in both his work ethic as well as the material appearance of his paintings. Mayo’s paintings were conceived as a response to brutal police repression of student protests. One gets the impression that the abstract scenes of violence are all the more effective since the viewer has to induce the image’s content detail by detail. The fragmented, dynamically interacting figurative elements recount a real event by using “real” objects such as chairs, bottles, and packs of cigarettes. What, however, does Czupryn do with this model? The first thing one notices is the difference in materialities. The wood grain in Czupryn’s version points to the sphere of materials and haptic experiences. Through being made into objects, the irritating floral-ornamental and object-like aspects from Mayo’s original are further intensified. What Czupryn shows, however, aren’t figures or fragments abstracted from reality, but rather autonomous outgrowths that develop according to their own unrealistic, seemingly organic dynamic. The pictorial objects follow the structure of Mayo’s template, yet they convey little of his recourse to the protests 80 years ago. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that Czupryn scales down the violence that permeates Mayo’s work to the level of a video game—one where zombies fight aliens, and baton blows fight the batons themselves. This impression comes not least from the mosaicked sky. Contrasted against the stage that seems to extend into the viewer’s space, the sky’s flatness underscores the artificiality of the entire scene. Standing before the painting that almost reaches down to the floor, I feel like an agent, like a player in a game whose rules I don’t understand. The precarious visual architecture stops me from diving into the visual space according to the classical rules of art. Or to say it differently: I feel like I’m logging into a visual event instead of being able to survey it from a distance. Clearly, we’re dealing with a mode of perception that goes beyond the classical dialog between observer and image. Let’s consider further details like the objects previously mentioned: the pack of cigarettes, the glass, or the bottle on the table. Unlike in Mayo’s image, the bottle here isn’t a concrete bottle with label, but rather a bottle as symbol, like the kind you might find on a smart phone’s emoji keyboard. Starting from this detail, I’d like to chart a course that takes us closer to the heart of Czupryn’s visual and artistic ideas. In the dialogue Czupryn stages with Mayo—as a proxy for classical painting, and Surrealism in particular—he confidently asserts his own position as a 21st-century contemporary whose experience of vision and reality has different preconditions: namely digitality. Here, it’s no longer about the formal-aesthetic approach to reality, whether it’s in the sense of figuration or abstraction. The foundational concepts for analyzing modern art don’t have much foothold here. In the digital age, any visual constellation is possible, and all of these constellations can be related to each other and visualized. In other words, they become real through interaction, regardless of whether they’re computer-generated or handcrafted on the canvas. Digitality means that reality’s space of possibility becomes fiction’s space of reality. When you look at several of Czupryn’s paintings in succession, you realize that the perspective, vanishing points, and centers all seem to be saying that the classical visual hierarchies have been systematically suspended. The arrangement of the pictorial objects and their interactions on flat stages resemble those of nodes in a network and more or less active visual sub-centers. The solitude of the contemplative romantic searching for meaning with his back turned to the analog world has grown passé. In Alternative Lifeforms from 2018, Czupryn stages Bruce Nauman’s ironic neon installation The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths in the center of his visual sign-network. The message is clear: here, autopoiesis reigns in its purest form. The network itself produces meaning, while the image of art as the educated bourgeois producer of “mystic truths” has been exhausted. In this self-producing cosmos of digital network animation which no longer has need of any direct relation to analog reality, there are no trompe l’oeil effects—to return to my original thought—no real deceptions. Everything is based a priori on artifacts and their suggestive staging. Czupryn’s Baton Blows is thus a programmatic copy in the way it marks the transition between classical modern painting and the aesthetics of contemporary perception through a series of minimal adjustments to the original. I have to admit that some of my provisional considerations here have left me feeling a bit clueless. How can one explain that an oil painting made with the finest glazes can no longer be read as a window or a surface, but rather as a user-interface? Or that the artist conceives of his medium as a means of performatively analyzing visuality, and no longer reality? Which factors must have come together, I ask myself, to trigger such a fundamental shift in artists’ worldviews, and not just aesthetically? All these questions seem ambivalent to me, even enigmatic. This might be because I’m still emotionally and biographically rooted in the good old analog world, and can’t understand the way digitality comes to visually produce reality. But that’s all the more reason for me to find inspiration in David Czupryn’s paintings: they teach me how to wonder.

Léon Krempel: You studied sculpture at first in Dusseldorf. How did you end up painting?

David Czupryn: In Lucy McKenzie’s painting class there was a workshop on trompe l’œil. My first pictures were my own sculptures, painted. Unlike sculptures, they were freed from gravity. I saw a lot of potential in it.

K.: Trompe-l’œil means “deceive the eye.” Do you want to deceive the viewer?

C.: There is always a point where you let yourself be deceived, but then also the point where you are clearly aware of being deceived. When you realize it’s painted, that’s when the pictures start to get exciting. Their nuances emerge. Their contents surrender their mysteries.

K.: The first thing the disillusioned viewer perceives is the picture, how it hangs on the wall. What do they encounter next?

C.: The total surface.

K.: The total surface?

C.: By that I mean a very smooth surface. I can only speak for myself, not for the art of this or that era. In our time, I wonder what a painted picture actually is. It’s obviously flat, but how flat and what does flat mean? Flat like a desktop, flat like user interfaces, photography, print media? I don’t have any brushstrokes in my paintings; they’re all flat in my own way.

K.: Your pictures sometimes give me the feeling of standing in front of a painted, box-shaped barrier. How do you construct space?

C.: I understand space to be very limited. In my work, there’s neither infinite image space nor horizons. Often I hint at architecture, sometimes only in the form of a wall; everything takes place in the foreground. I make sure that the objects approach the viewer instead of the viewer having to enter the picture to grasp its atmosphere. I’m looking for the opposite of immersive space. The atmosphere of the image must be strong enough to have an effect on the space where the viewer is physically located.

K.: How does your copy of the 1937 painting Coups de Bâtons (Truncheon blows) by the Egyptian surrealist Mayo (»Baton blows«) fit into this?

C.: Well, I do not know if I copied or interpreted it; what I liked about it though is the decomposition of a crowd that builds up directly in front of the viewer. Mayo abandoned the calvary perspective used by painters of battle scenes; he arranged the melée like a grid of limbs and weapons, so you can look through it into the background.

K.: In a series of three pictures (»Both at once« i.e.), you break open the box-shaped space to paint cloudy skies. What attracts you to this classical task?

C.: Well, it’s interesting that you think the sky is in the background. Perhaps it is only mirrored, made out of tiles or wallpaper. I didn’t paint the sky as a natural sky. Rather, I am guided by an idea of a material that depicts heaven. So we’re back to the ambiguity of trompe l’œil. In Both at Once, we see a Janus face, who also does not know where he is looking, first forwards towards the viewer, then back to a sky that isn’t necessarily one.

K.: Rather aptly for heaven, does death greet us in another picture from the trilogy?

C.: Yes, namely as a silent valet or silent butler. Death personified in an everyday object.

K.: Conspicuous figures like death are part of the fixed repertoire of your pictures. You have even developed your own formal vocabulary for them. In the trompe l’œil tradition, on the other hand, they only appear occasionally. Where do yours come from?

C.: My figures are inspired by figurative sculpture. That has been the same for me across all periods. In painting I can literally twist and turn them as I want. Anything that fits the context is allowed. But you also encounter my figures in real life.

K.: But you mostly omit any gender-specific features.

C.: Yes, for me it’s simply about our species, and not politics or sociology, where women and men are still often perceived separately. That’s why I look at more general human behaviors. For example, “aggression” could be personified by a genderless figure in my picture.

K.: How do you indicate your figures’ characters?

C.: Just like in sculpture, attributes sharpen the figures’ characters for me.

K.: Your pictures are full of quotes and allusions. What are they needed for?

C.: Once again, much has been taken from sculpture here. For me, quotations from other artists’ works have a function beyond the attributes, in that they combine art and everyday life. To give an example, imagine Isa Genzken’s concrete radio. In an exhibition, it could be read as a metaphor for anti-communication, for example. In a still life that I paint, it refers both to the artwork with all its possibilities of interpretation and to the everyday object.

K.: Let me return to the formal once more. When surface is so important to you, what is the significance of color?

C.: A friend of mine once said, “Oh, David doesn’t actually need light to paint, he knows what’s written on the tube.” It’s true, I think in materials and they require the appropriate colors. Color is not secondary, but it subordinates itself exactly like all the other aspects. When examining a material that I would like to portray, I look at its composition first. Painting and its techniques enable me to portray chemical compositions or aging processes, for example, in a much more differentiated way than would be possible if I were to only pay attention to form and color, or to take photographs.

K.: You used complementary color contrasts in the image duo Pseudo Twins. It seems to me that color is able to do a little more than that for you.

C.: The Pseudo Twins are drawn from axisymmetric pseudo-architectures. You know, these Roman grotesques, fantastic, how weightless it all seems, eggs and other small objects hung on threads, only birds moving among them freely. In my interpretation, they became two pictures with one figure each. There is no perfect symmetry, that’s what makes it exciting. The figure on the left is made out of white marble and light wood, and the one on the right out of black marble and dark wood—the complementary color contrasts also serve to link what is spatially separated. Working on it led me to the extreme point where the two images mutually complete and neutralize each other.

K.: How do you use light and shadow in your pictures?

C.: Pragmatically. For me, it’s a question of volumes and surfaces. Because of this “and,” there are no direct light sources in my pictures, except once from a burning candle. In my work, it’s always what I call Bernd-and-Hilla-Becher weather: midday, cloudy sky, diffused light, no harsh shadows.

K.: One of your large-formats has a programmatic character in my opinion. How do you describe your 2017 image Alternative Life Forms?

C.: Very briefly: You have four non-gender-specific figures in front of the wall of a house with a balcony. From left to right, these are architecture, writing, music, and art. Art appears as painting and painting, on the other hand, as archeology.

K.: A self-portrait?

C.: The art-painting-archeology was supposed to be that at first, but then I did away with any similarities to myself.

K.: One of music’s features is a picture by Andy Warhol of Basquiat. Why Basquiat?

C.: Well, Basquiat was a member of a band called Gray before he made his career as an artist. And the guitar you see underneath is Picasso’s guitar. I have to think of Basquiat’s life story, where, as a little boy, he stands with his mother in front of a Picasso at the MoMA and thinks that he wants to do that too.

K.: In your recent painting, you also deal with subculture. What does it mean to you and where is it reflected here?

C.: In the picture my particular concern is the techno subculture that emerged out of electronic dance music. In my figures, I tried to translate the intoxication of its devotees and build them their own temple—it is the largest picture I have painted so far. Subculture is interesting for me, because it repeatedly develops beautiful microcosms and is innovative. It has its own particular codes and thrives well in a political climate, before it becomes mainstream and people cash in on it.