You get this sensuous sense of something extending in and out of time, something that doesn’t belong to the earth and something that is rooted very much in the earth. — Robert Smithson on walking through Hotel Palenque, 1972.¹

A walk through the galleries of Thomas Ruff’s wall-sized JPEGs is an extreme, anonymous and dislocating experience. The artist’s technique is displacement: small-format image files culled from the Internet are manipulated and expanded to murals. The pixilation is heightened, the picture made coarse by pronounced modules of colour. Compressed image files meant as hard-drive space-savers for fast and easy information exchanges mutate into monumental symbols of contemporary convention. As Roy Lichtenstein painted using the swollen circles of the printing press’ Benday dot, so Ruff takes from contemporary media to show us our visual world estranged and engorged.

There is movement here. The way you can feel the flick of a wrist in a brushstroke, here you sense a prolonged click of a mouse, its arrow responding accordingly, stretching the image plane from the bottom righthand corner to the edge of the screen — and beyond. The pixels connect and clash, their colours bouncing off one another. This dance of pigment and hue on a static surface is comparable to the theory and technique of many late nineteenth and early twentieth-century painters, including Pointillists, Impressionists and German Expressionists.

The events recorded are both placid and threatening, prosaic and momentous. JPEG sr01 (an acronym of sun in a river — titles too are coded and compressed towards digital size and speed) reveals colours that make an aerial view of a river seem bright and dewy with the reflection of a rainbow, and also somehow inky and sinister with the weight of an oil spill. JPEG ib01 (iceberg) presents with stunning coolness an island of an iceberg as an ominous symbol of glacial retreat, one of global warming’s many devastating ecological effects. JPEG icbm05 (intercontinental ballistic missile) is an obvious symbol of nuclear warfare but also reflects the mid-century space and rocket technology that still determines national success.

Ruff shows us images we have seen before, images of death and destruction repeated time and again: JPEG wl01 (war in Lebanon) of a bombed-out building in Beirut, and the more well-known JPEG ny11 (new york) of the smoky and crumbled remains of the World Trade Centre. These are the grand narratives of history painting: mythologized scenes of battles and their winners, losers and heroes. Ruff’s history paintings, however, lack heroes, where nature and civilization alike are revealed a naked ruin.

Pixels and colours make these subjects strange — familiar subjects to be experienced anew. Pixels and colours also make this death and disaster series playful and moving. Ruff’s manipulation is a multifaceted structural reversal. Small, speedy structures are remade massive and static. The combination of structural compression and expansion ricochets images between the earth and other worlds. Exposed pixel patterns are a playful painter’s manipulations of shape and shade, and a serious theorist’s baring of the formula of images.

¹ ‘Insert: Robert Smithson Hotel Palenque, 1969-72.’ Parkett no.43 (1995)