Johannes Kreidler has been using musical notes as a graphic design element since 2013. Starting with a mini- malist-conceptual approach, as it were the sheet of music with title and below it the piece that visually handles the notes like basic shapes (rectangle, circle, line and surface), for example in Aura or Sunset, he has been expanding the process to more pictoriality since 2021, with far larger amounts of notes. Less reduced to the elementary, but coarsened only one step to quasi pixels, which are then replaced with note symbols and thus form shading and contours, Kreidler generates very detailed “scores” as images, be it figurative or abstract.
The conversion algorithm has variables – which musical symbols are used, how high the resolution is; there is also a certain amount of error or over-accuracy when even monochrome surfaces become variant. The use of the process remains conceptual, as the variety of subjects and templates shows: These can be the art- ist’s own photographs, portraits, found photographs as well as the fund of art history. As in Kreidler’s earli- er works, this is not without irony: Martin Kippenberger’s mockery receives an equal answer, René Magritte’s ambiguity is turned against himself, Yves Klein’s monochromaticity becomes a pulsating tapestry of notes. On the other hand, the “repaintings” of Gerhard Richter’s pictures, borrowed from his own method of photo transfers, are, with or without knowledge of their provenance, complex note pictures, musically and visually.
