Light Animation Design for paintings by Monty Richthofen.

His exhibition “Cheap Hedonism” culminates in the immersive installation “If This Is You Who Am I,” which consists of large-format lightboxes and a sound collage by the artist Yasmina Dexter. Painting and sound are tied together by a light effects programmed by Elias Asisi. Writing can vaguely be made out on the lightboxes but proves indecipherable because it is contaminated, obscured, and covered up by black paint. The artist’s slowed-down and distorted voice emerges from the soundscape. The longer one spends time in the room, the more clearly one thinks one perceives the illegible texts on the lightboxes, and for a brief and almost entirely elusive instant it feels like one glimpses their meaning. “In painting, I have no use for small formats. I paint with my entire body,” Monty says. The simultaneity of the expansive gesture, whose roots he locates in his graffiti-artist years, and the nebulous effacement and near-disappearance and bubbling-up-again is part of the work’s charm. He redacts his own writing. Which is nonetheless still there. And remains a mystery. “Blacked out again,” as the artist puts it.

Photos: Patrick O’Byrne. © Monty Richthofen, Courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin.

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