MUNICH.- KÖNIG Bergson is presenting The Goya Project, a new solo exhibition by Swiss artist Andy Denzler. 16 oil-on-canvas paintings form a suite in which Denzler has appropriated, reimagined, and ultimately transformed works by the late 18th, early 19th-century Spanish master. Francisco de Goya.

The individual works in The Goya Project are striking for the degree to which they blur, abstract, and obfuscate the visual language of the original works after which they are taken. In particular, the almost total lack of color is immediately apparent, turning what might have been nuanced areas into pure value contrasts of black and white, introducing a significant element of visual noise into the pictorial equation, and allusion to the binarism of the digital age in which these newer works were produced. This effect drowns the compositional clarity of Goya’s tableaux under an ocean of interference and obtrusion as if the source material were being viewed through a poorly focused closed-circuit television. Denzler’s specific choice of turning the originals into glitchy, low-fidelity paintings, amounts to a contemporary version of the transformations wrought by Goya as he put the genre of history painting into direct dialogue with the roiling present.

The remove captured in The Goya Project is both temporal and media-historical, problematizing not just the in- accessibility of the context out of which the earlier works were born, but the lens through which such paintings can be seen today. In the suite named Goya's Fire I-XII, 2021-22, which form the bulk of the show, individual segments pulled from some larger, absent whole are presented, whose organizational imperative has been erased from the resultant fragments. At least two different Goya paintings are discernible, from the war epic, The Second of May, 1808 to a smaller, lesser-known panel painting, A Procession of Flagellants, 1812-19. Characters remain, but lacking color and compositional anchoring, the series that follows is no longer bound to the fidelity of historical reportage, nor to the accuracy of an original. In their visual wow and flutter, Denzler’s paintings take the incessant march of time and stretch it horizontally, flattening the language of representation along with it.

The most recent of these paintings are muted, colored reappraisals of Goya’s iconic MAYA, of which both a nude and clothed version were executed around 1800. The presentation of both versions underscores the degree of unmasking, like the removal of Maya’s garments, that courses through all the works in the show, in which a smooth representational surface is undermined everywhere by descriptive insufficiencies.

Included as well in The Goya Project is a work of time-based media: a video that is projected on the silos of the former power plant in which KÖNICH Bergson is located, putting the dizzying transformations at work in the paintings into the real space of the exhibition environment. The heralding of a digital age is not unlike the one in which Goya found himself, and Denzler’s historical citations are similarly imbued with the tremendous upheavals in the social and political spheres of everyday life. In the relatively brief period in which the current works were created, the filtering screens of a mediatized world have only grown in scale and dimension, and Denzler is one of a few artists who put our very habits of seeing and witnessing into a state of radical indeterminacy, offering the painted picture as its own filter, replete with saturation and noise, which reflects rather than remedies the present.