Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, there is a painter whose work dissects our era with the rigor of an anatomist and the sensitivity of a melancholic poet. Andy Denzler does not just paint portraits; he dissects contemporary temporality with his spatulas like a surgeon of lost time. In his monumental canvases, where human figures seem trapped in the meshes of a failing video, a profound meditation on our post-digital condition is revealed. The Swiss artist born in 1965 has been developing for more than two decades a unique visual language that questions our relationship to time, image, and memory in a world saturated with digital flows.
The Aesthetic of Glitch
Denzler’s work is rooted in a cinematic tradition that he revisits through the lens of digital error. His paintings immediately evoke those moments when a VHS tape jams, when the image unravels in horizontal bands, when the visual flow reveals its technical nature. This aesthetic of glitch, or visual malfunction, which the artist masters with consummate virtuosity, finds its roots in what Rebecca Jackson defines as “the result of a bad communication between transmitter and receiver during information transcoding” [1]. For Denzler, this technical failure becomes a poetic language.
The Zurich artist does not just imitate the digital accident; he orchestrates it. His alla prima technique, consisting of painting wet on wet then scraping the surface before drying, perfectly simulates these temporal distortions we all know. When he explains: “My intention is to work with time. Because the paint dries quickly on canvas, and because I work wet on wet, I have to paint against time too” [2], Denzler reveals the performative dimension of his practice. Each canvas becomes the theater of a race against time, where the artist must capture the moment before it freezes permanently.
This urgent temporality echoes contemporary post-cinematic theories. Digital cinema, by dissolving the photographic indexicality dear to André Bazin, has created a new image regime where, as Karen Redrobe observes, “mediation can no longer be properly situated between the poles of subject and object, because it swells with processual affectivity to encompass both” [3]. Denzler’s paintings, with their figures whose faces are partially dissolved, perfectly embody this dissolution of traditional categories between representation and presentation, between image and reality.
The artist draws from his personal library of photographic images, but also from found images and, more recently, from prompts generated by artificial intelligence. This layering of sources reveals a sharp understanding of our contemporary visual ecology, where analog, digital, and synthetic images coexist in a perpetual flow. His compositions evoke those moments of suspension where film, threatened by technology, reveals its materiality. The horizontal bands that streak his canvases recall those cathodic interferences which, far from being mere accidents, index the technological nature of the medium itself.
This poetics of technical error flourishes particularly in his recent series such as “Hybrid Souls” or “The Drift,” where Denzler explores our post-human condition. The figures, often depicted with closed or averted eyes, seem to navigate between several states of consciousness. They embody this “hybrid reality” described by the artist, where our identities oscillate between physical presence and digital echo. From this perspective, the glitch is no longer merely an aesthetic accident but an existential symptom of our age.
The cinematic dimension of Denzler’s work is also evident in his conception of pictorial narration. Each canvas functions as a freeze-frame that captures a moment of transition. This suspended temporality evokes the experiments of filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov or Jean-Luc Godard, who already questioned the nature of filmic time. For Denzler, painting becomes still cinema, where each work virtually contains the movement that preceded it and that which will follow. This dynamic conception of the still image reveals a sophisticated understanding of contemporary visual issues, where the boundary between moving and still image tends to blur.
Architecture and Memory
If Denzler’s work dialogues with cinema, it maintains equally deep connections with architecture, not as decor but as a structuring principle of temporal experience. The Swiss artist intuitively understands what Juhani Pallasmaa formulates as follows: “Domestic architecture tames unlimited space and allows us to inhabit it, but it should also tame infinite time and allow us to inhabit the temporal continuum” [4]. Denzler’s compositions function precisely as temporal architectures, space-times where our memorial experience crystallizes.
His interiors, often photographed in his own studio, are not mere backgrounds but active memorial devices. These domestic spaces, unmade sofas, leather armchairs, and dimly lit rooms, act as triggers for involuntary memory. The artist reveals how architecture participates in this “passivity of memory” that Maurice Merleau-Ponty identified as central in our relationship to lived time. Our memories do not emerge ex nihilo but arise from our bodily interaction with specific places, charged with affects and personal histories.
This architectural dimension of memory finds remarkable plastic translation in Denzler’s very technique. His scraper scratches create temporal stratifications that evoke urban testimonies. Each layer of paint retains traces of previous layers, creating a pictorial archaeology where past and present coexist. This material superimposition echoes the sedimentation processes characterizing the architectural experience of the city, where each era leaves its traces in the urban fabric.
Architect Peter Zumthor, recalling his childhood memories in his aunt’s house, speaks of these “architectural experiences without thinking about them.” He remembers “the sound of gravel under my feet, the soft glow of the waxed oak staircase. I hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk down the dark hallway and enter the kitchen” [5]. This phenomenology of dwelling finds a striking echo in Denzler’s works, where the figures seem inhabited by their spaces just as much as they inhabit them.
The artist excels at depicting these “moments of reflection” revealed by the title of one of his recent exhibitions. His characters, often captured in moments of contemplation or rest, embody this particular temporality of domestic habitation. They are not doing anything specific; they are simply inhabiting the space-time of intimacy. This apparent banality masks a remarkable conceptual depth: Denzler understands that architecture does not merely shelter our bodies but structures our very temporal experience.
The question of architectural memory arises with particular urgency in our era of increasing dematerialization. Physical spaces lose significance in the face of virtual environments, and our memories are increasingly disconnected from their traditional spatial anchors. Denzler’s work resists this deterritorialization by reaffirming the importance of physical places as matrices of memorial experience. His interiors, although distorted by the pictorial technique, retain their evocative power. They remind us that we are embodied beings, whose temporality is anchored in concrete spaces.
This architectural dimension also expresses itself in the spatial conception of his compositions. Denzler organizes his canvases as habitable spaces, where the gaze can wander and linger. The visual distortion does not cancel spatial depth but complicates it, creating impossible architectures that evoke the spaces described by Gaston Bachelard in his “Poetics of Space.” These pictorial environments function as “machines to inhabit” time, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, devices that allow us to experience different temporal regimes within the same plastic space.
Between Nostalgia and Futurism
Denzler’s work flourishes in this liminal zone where past and future collide. His paintings carry a deep nostalgia for analog images while fully embracing their grounding in the digital age. This temporal tension is particularly manifested in his chromatic palette, dominated by these “earth tones, ochres, browns, blacks, flesh tones, and grays” noted by Noah Becker [6]. These colors immediately evoke yellowed photographs, degraded film reels, those material traces of the passing of time on images.
Yet this visual melancholy never slips into past-ism. The artist understands that contemporary nostalgia is not directed towards a fantasized past but toward aborted futures, technological possibilities that did not come to be. His distortions simultaneously evoke the failures of analog technology and the glitches of the digital era, creating a composite time where different technological strata coexist. This hybrid temporality reveals our contemporary condition, caught between technological acceleration and the persistence of our archaic perceptual structures.
Denzler’s working method perfectly embodies this temporal dialectic. He begins by constructing a “perfect painting,” in his own words, before systematically deconstructing it. This operation of creative destruction evokes the degradation processes that affect our memory supports. Our memories never reach us intact but are always already altered by time, distorted by forgetfulness, fragmented by emotion. Denzler’s canvases materialize this specific memorial temporality, where the past constantly recomposes itself in the present.
This poetics of degradation finds a particular resonance in our era of ecological transition. As our societies become aware of their transitory nature, Denzler’s art reminds us that every image, every memory, every civilization carries within it the seeds of its own transformation. His spectral figures, caught in temporal flows beyond them, embody this post-historical condition where humanity must reinvent its relationship with time and memory.
The Swiss artist also reveals how our digital age transforms our relationship with the still image. In a world saturated with moving images, where video streams dominate our screens, Denzler’s painting reasserts the specificity of the still image. But this immobility is only apparent: his canvases vibrate with latent movement, as if at any moment they were about to start moving again. This tension between fixity and movement reveals a keen understanding of the contemporary visual challenges, where the still image must justify its persistence in the face of the flood of moving images.
The Studio as a Temporal Laboratory
Denzler’s studio, located near Lake Zurich, functions as a true laboratory of temporalities. It is there that the artist orchestrates these encounters between models and light, between photography and painting, between documented past and creative present. This workspace does not merely house artistic production; it conditions it, structures it, gives it its specific temporality. The artist summons his friends and collaborators there, creating that particular intimacy that characterizes his works.
This collaborative dimension reveals another facet of Denzler’s temporality. His models do not pose in the classical sense but temporarily inhabit the studio space. They bring their bodies, their affects, their personal histories there, creating those “contemplative moments” that the artist excels at capturing. This temporality shared between the artist and his models is inscribed into the very material of the painting, creating works where the human trace remains perceptible despite technical distortions.
Denzler’s recent stylistic evolution, marked by the introduction of more colorful elements and more complex compositions, reflects this ability to develop his practice while maintaining its conceptual coherence. His new works, such as “Distorted Land” or “Flying Tires,” reveal an artist capable of expanding his plastic vocabulary without losing his specificity. This evolution is not a simple change but a deepening, an exploration of new expressive possibilities within a continuous research on the temporal stakes of the image.
The recent use of artificial intelligence in his practice constitutes a particularly revealing development of his understanding of contemporary issues. Rather than rejecting this emerging technology, Denzler integrates it into his creative process as a new tool for image generation. This pragmatic approach reveals an artist aware that contemporary art must engage with the technologies of its era, not to celebrate them blindly but to reveal their expressive potentials and existential limits.
From this perspective, Denzler’s workshop functions as a space of creative resistance against contemporary technological acceleration. The relative slowness of oil painting, the necessity of the physical presence of models, and the irreducible materiality of canvases all serve as salutary brakes against pervasive dematerialization. Without resorting to technophobia, the artist reaffirms the importance of long temporal processes in contrast to dominant digital instantaneity.
His canvases, often monumental, demand a physical presence from the viewer that no digital reproduction can replace. This irreducibility of the pictorial experience constitutes another aspect of his resistance to contemporary virtualization. Faced with the authentic work, the viewer must slow down, stop, and take the time to decipher these complex images where different temporalities coexist.
Towards an Aesthetic of Intermittent Presence
Denzler’s work emerges as one of the most accomplished attempts of our time to plastically think about contemporary mutations of temporality. Far from merely illustrating ongoing technological transformations, the Swiss artist develops an original visual language that reveals the existential stakes of our post-digital condition. His spectral figures, caught in temporal flows that surpass them, embody this contemporary humanity that must reinvent its relationships with time, space, and memory.
The importance of Denzler in the contemporary artistic landscape lies in this unique ability to cross the heritage of traditional painting with the most current questions about image and temporality. His work constitutes a remarkable bridge between the old masters he admires, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Freud, and the aesthetic challenges of our hyperconnected era. This synthesis is never superficial but proceeds from a profound understanding of the stakes at hand.
The notion of “intermittent presence” suggested by his glitch aesthetic is particularly interesting. In a world where presence tends to fragment between multiple screens and digital solicitations, Denzler offers a representation of this shattered condition. His characters with partially erased faces embody this contemporary presence, both here and elsewhere, present and distracted, embodied and virtualized. This between-two aesthetic reveals an acute understanding of our contemporary existential situation.
The future of this pictorial research appears full of promise. As our societies navigate between the emergence of new technologies and the persistence of archaic perceptual structures, Denzler’s art offers a privileged space for meditation on these ongoing transformations. His future works will likely have to contend with the accelerated evolution of visual technologies, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse, while maintaining the demand for physical presence and long temporality that characterizes painting.
Denzler’s work teaches us that contemporary art should not flee the technological transformations of its time but rather traverse them to reveal their human dimensions. By fully embracing his anchoring in the digital era while reaffirming the specificities of painting, the Swiss artist forges an original path that could inspire a whole generation of creators faced with the same existential challenges. His art reminds us that behind every technical innovation lie fundamental anthropological questions that only art can reveal in all their complexity.
From this perspective, Andy Denzler appears as one of the most clear-sighted witnesses of our era of transformations. His work will undoubtedly constitute, for future generations, a precious document on this pivotal period when humanity had to reinvent its relationships to image, time, and presence. Beyond its undeniable aesthetic quality, Denzler’s art possesses this testimonial dimension that characterizes great works: it documents not only the era that gave birth to him but also reveals the forces shaping our present deeply.
- Jackson, Rebecca. “The Glitch Aesthetic.” Thesis, 2011.
- Denzler, Andy. Quote taken from the exhibition “Between the Shadows”, Opera Gallery.
- Redrobe, Karen. “The Glitch as Propaedeutic to a Materialist Theory of Post-Cinematic Affect.” medieninitiative, 2015.
- Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.” Wiley, 2005.
- Zumthor, Peter. “Atmospheres.” Birkhäuser, 2006.
- Becker, Noah. Critical quote, Whitehot Magazine.
