The montage of attractions was a 1924 theory devised by the Russian film director Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn, who ranks among the most influential and revolutionary directors in film making history for his use of montage and innovative formal compositions of image—and made by unprecedented technical developments. The montage of attractions looks in all ways metaphorically incomplete, cluttered and misplaced, with the spectator having to put in an active effort to make sense of the plot’s elements and meanings.

This chimes with the theory of the stimuli—where the viewer is awakened from the numbness of passively assimilating a plot unfolding before his eyes, and in fact encouraged via a forceful visual disruption to use his own imagination, stirring new emotions and associations of ideas. It also bears a correspondence with the concept of a hypertext; a system where documents (or knots) are put into relation with each other through keywords, allowing for an infinite number of possible reading paths.

André Hemer’ s contemporary Weltanschauung, is informed by our received and reworked notions of intertexuality theory as formulated by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes among others. In keeping with this, if we were to define the term art we could begin with the definition of the Latin word ars; immediately rendered as simply “skill” or “mastery”, but also conveying other meanings from technique, to deception, knowledge, magic, gimmick, craft to theory, which gives an insight into the composite connotations this word has had since the Roman times. Most importantly new media has acted upon art in two different directions: the first, theoretical, concerning its very definition; and the second, more practical, about new possible ways of expression.

Thus, just like in the montage of attractions, André Hemer’s aesthetically charged and layered visions— on both a physical and visual level—are made out of complex digital images transposed onto canvas and punctuated via a manual and pictorial action, that defy while at the same time exert a compelling pull towards the viewer’s perception. This acts as a simple testament of hybridization (a remix) between the contemporary and the traditional. The given images, imbued with the author’s personal perspective, channel a new symbolism that the viewer is invited to interpret. According to a new way of montage that is applied to fixed visuals, art moves individual thinking, ideas and emotions through our senses, pushing past the material nature of places, volumes and matter.

—Domenico de Chirico

The Cobra Effect #3
Acrylic and pigment on canvas
160 x 114 cm (63 x 44 7/8 in)

The Cobra Effect #3
Acrylic and pigment on canvas
160 x 114 cm (63 x 44 7/8 in)