Roland Boden

The basis of the work of Roland Boden are comprehensive collections of series of personally-made photographs, shot in metropoles around the world. These collections are supplemented with material found in different media, the web and movie stills. This material is used as a sort of photographic sketch book. The exposures of largely exchangeable urban suburbia and satellites – wastelands and demolitions, investment ruins, military and...

The basis of the work of Roland Boden are comprehensive collections of series of personally-made photographs, shot in metropoles around the world. These collections are supplemented with material found in different media, the web and movie stills. This material is used as a sort of photographic sketch book. The exposures of largely exchangeable urban suburbia and satellites – wastelands and demolitions, investment ruins, military and scientific architecture and run-down concrete buildings of the Sixties – serve as a modular construction kit to generate fictional urban landscapes, patterns and ornaments of our time, vertically built in concrete.
These scenarios are used then to construct architectural 3D models. The entirely computer generated mockups function as perspectival raw sketches to prepare paintings.
In this way created „urban landscapes“ refer as well to the avant-garde utopian ideas of the 20th century as to drafts of fascist and early soviet architecture. Superpositions of cells, vertical grids and opened constructions between setup and demolition are the expressions of a in itself collapsed modernism.It´s important for the images to break the digital smoothness and artificiality of the computer generated images by an analogue component. Hand-made oil paintings necessitate an analogous blur or breezing, a so called „used“ surface, which cannot generated digitally.
Parallel with the paintings on canvas also exist paper drawings based on patterns, micro structures, enigmatic codes or construction grids. These surfaces were once used as an information provider of social systems, but the readabilitiy of the information is often vanished by encoding, alienation, multiple copying or interference: an ambient noise level of the information society.