Video: Stefan Roloff, FACE 1984
Music: Suicide, DOMINIC CHRIST 1987
Stefan Roloff about the Moving Painting technique:
„Two Van Dyck Portraits titled „Genovese Couple“ hang next to each other in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. When you step in front of them, they look straight at you. They have a soul, as though two real people were in the room. For a long time, I wondered how Van Dyck and a few other painters managed to achieve such an effect. They took their time, painting for weeks or months. Sometimes the model came in a happy mood, sometimes somber, talkative or silent. And inevitably, the painters added their own moods. Viewing the final painting, we automatically perceive the life of the layers beneath.
I wanted to realize this concept through a video. Paintings are built spatially, videos through time. A painting’s layers lie on top of each other, a video’s frames next to each other. In 1984, at the New York Institute of Technology I filmed 900 successive layers of an imaginary portrait on a single canvas. Later, they were edited into a 3- minute sequence that loops backwards, resulting in the six minute- piece „Face“, my first Moving Painting."
