TRUST

For Roman Schramm, “trust is not an attitude. It is a decision made over and over again — and the moment it is made, it has already changed.” The desire to sustain this state shapes the work, turning the process itself into a material. It manifests in a persistent impulse to escape what has already been done. While the art system rewards repetition as a stylistic refuge, Schramm chooses departure. By suspending aesthetic conventions, he lets the safety nets fall away. Rather than expressing vulnerability or fear, the images in Trust embrace the inherent creativity of the process — and the possibility of being surprised by one’s own material.

That material begins with the fusion of watercolor and oil paintings through Photoshop, a collaboration between the artist and the algorithm. Onto the resulting painterly structure, Schramm layers photographic images and grid-like details. The figures that emerge dissolve into the background, because no distance separates the observing eye from the imagining one. At times, monochrome tones prevail; at others, colors merge into a juxtaposed palette. Landscapes, animals, self-portraits, flowers, fragments of street signage, urban views, architectural structures — none of these resolve into recognizable images. Instead, they draw us into their transformation: into what might be called their possible abstractions.

The “disappearance of the image within the image” that Trust proposes invites reflection on the veracity we ascribe to High Definition images. The quality and technical processes at work allow the underlying grid to surface and assert itself. From a distance, we believe we recognize something sharp and legible — but move closer, and we find unfocused planes and scattered dots. Superimposition upon superimposition produces new structures in which original motifs become indistinguishable. What Schramm’s images make clear is that physical proximity offers no guarantee of intellectual comprehension. Reality recedes into the surface beneath it.

As in a sequence of daydreams, a certain present keeps returning — staged through glimpsed images and apparitions. In each of these prints on photographic paper, manually applied layers of varnish create differentiated levels of gloss and depth. In Trust, we do not only see photographs. We see what holds them.

Mariano Mayer, curator