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 \u201cscores\u201d 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\u2019s own photographs, portraits, found photographs as well as the fund of art history. As in Kreidler\u2019s earli- er works, this is not without irony: Martin Kippenberger\u2019s mockery receives an equal answer, Rene\u0301 Magritte\u2019s ambiguity is turned against himself, Yves Klein\u2019s monochromaticity becomes a pulsating tapestry of notes. On the other hand, the \u201crepaintings\u201d of Gerhard Richter\u2019s pictures, borrowed from his own method of photo transfers, are, with or without knowledge of their provenance, complex note pictures, musically and visually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n