Thomas Ruff: jpegs

Blown up to the scale of traditional nineteenth-century history paintings, the images in the jpegs series are noticeably blurred yet remain legible, producing an almost painterly effect wherein grids of mechanical pixilation substitute for the expressiveness of a brushstroke, and, like the works of the Impressionists, the full image only comes into view at a distance. Soon after the completion of the first images in the series, Ruff expanded his interrogation to include a wide range of subject matter—from acts of war and terrorism to mundane imagery of bucolic landscapes, all coded with standardized shorthand titles, designed to allow the viewer only partial access to the subject matter.