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Lot Essay
A kaleidoscopic aurora of psychedelic colour and pulsating abstract matter, Thomas Ruff’s Substrat 30 III (2007) is an impressive example of the German photographer’s Substratum series, and is a crucial demonstration of Ruff’s experiments with photography in a digital age. For the series, Ruff surfed the internet to extract images from Japanese manga and anime, transforming the source material into unrecognisable technicolour fields, printed on photographic paper using conventional development methods. Although seemingly a purely computerised creation, the essence of photography remains instilled at the heart of the work, with Viviane Rehberg noting that ‘no matter how much one might want to see painting or digital virtuosity here, there seems to be no getting around the matter of the photograph. After all, a substratum is what facilitates the adhesion of the light-sensitive emulsion in the making of one. It is, in a sense, the very foundation of the photographic image’ (V. Rehberg, ‘Thomas Ruff: Surface Tension’, Tate Essay, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/thomas-ruff-2602/surface-tension [accessed 30 July 2018]).
Concurrently, the term ‘substratum’ connotes something beneath the surface, an underlying layer that cannot be clearly deciphered or acknowledged. With this series, there is a potent friction between what can be seen and what is comprehended. The Japanese source material is stripped of its narrative meaning, intoxicatingly plummeted into an apparently cybernated realm so that, as critic Megan Heuer commented, ‘there is no trace of the subject matter, only the brilliant hues that suggest a digitally enhanced world’ (M. Heuer, ‘Thomas Ruff – New Work’, in The Brooklyn Rail, 1 August 2003, https://brooklynrail.org/2003/08/artseen/thomas-ruff-new-work [accessed 30 July 2018]). In an era of ‘fake news’, where information is appropriated, manipulated and deceptively falsified, Ruff’s work is perhaps a pertinent and powerful visual metaphor for the cloaking, dissolving and dissemination of an authentic truth.
Concurrently, the term ‘substratum’ connotes something beneath the surface, an underlying layer that cannot be clearly deciphered or acknowledged. With this series, there is a potent friction between what can be seen and what is comprehended. The Japanese source material is stripped of its narrative meaning, intoxicatingly plummeted into an apparently cybernated realm so that, as critic Megan Heuer commented, ‘there is no trace of the subject matter, only the brilliant hues that suggest a digitally enhanced world’ (M. Heuer, ‘Thomas Ruff – New Work’, in The Brooklyn Rail, 1 August 2003, https://brooklynrail.org/2003/08/artseen/thomas-ruff-new-work [accessed 30 July 2018]). In an era of ‘fake news’, where information is appropriated, manipulated and deceptively falsified, Ruff’s work is perhaps a pertinent and powerful visual metaphor for the cloaking, dissolving and dissemination of an authentic truth.