Michael Klipphahn – Paradise

Michael Klipphahn transfers images of flowers, leaves, hair and skin from elaborately mounted and distorted photographs into painting. The digital illusions of reality become porcelain-like perfect paintings. Fragmentary image details emphasise the play with deception and illusion, with erotic appearance and untouchability. The optical impression of the living is stopped in its natural fleetingness and captured with surreal clarity. However, the suggestion of closeness and presence ends in denial: with subtle hints, the painter makes clear what the old cultural technique of oil painting is capable of achieving in the context of our present.