Do pictures conceal what they obviously seem to show or do they represent no more than a superficial surface? The transformation of pictures into graphic paths (vectorization) is an attempt to make specific structures visible. His starting materials are screenshots taken from television, screenshots and pictures taken from the internet. Whilst destroying the original picture in the end, a new reality is created. Wolfgang Herbold works with a wide variety of digital programs, experimenting unintentionally (streamline of (un-) consciousness) and with aleatory elements. This process leads to pictures that can expose and transmit the hidden structures of the original pictures, while presenting a new individual cartography of reality (mapping). These pictures resemble abstract paintings, technical scientific illustrations, graphic diagrams, or inventions of a structural engineer. The result is unpredictable. It leaves room for associations, can be transferred to other domains, and fulfills purely aesthetic criteria. It will never be completed or present itself in a definite final form, as the artist continues to work on it to reshape it and to find new ways of composition. Wolfgang Herbold aims at achieving a graphic pattern keeping most options open. His general interest in the aesthetics of scientific illustrations, in particular in the pictures taken by scanning electron microscopes and the allegedly true picture they reflect, was at the starting point of his work. At first, he wanted to fake such pictures and scientific diagrams himself. Then, eventually, he evolved his own kind of innovative experiments with digital programs: “Digital Mapping - graphic paths to human nature. A visual attempt at outgrowing photography.”
“The microcosm of these worlds of images is fragmented and gives expression to the pleasure in a continual de-hierarchization of its objects. Everything is in a state of flux, caught in processes of metamorphosis. The malleability of the reality stored in the image is celebrated sensuously and the transformation of all visible phenomena is declared to be the sole constant. The pull of the fragment unfolds a startling appeal and suggests the beauty of ever new, unstable compounds. The elements enter into new relations, each particle can become an attractor and radiate a force field which holds the embedded graphic particle right up to the periphery. Relations act at a distance, everything is connected with everything else, but the family relations remain extremely distanced. A segment of a circle leads, on a long leash, a black scribble which approaches an orange patch of color which in turn had its analogue origin in the medical image of a blood test.”
Professor Dr. Sabine Fabo
Untitled (NR 23.6), 2002. Inkjet print. 29.7 × 42 cm
Untitled (D.E12.2), 2002. Inkjet print
Untitled (NR 21.14), 2002. Inkjet print
Untitled (NR 33.17), 2002. Inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist
