Paul Pfeiffer works with video, digital photographs and installations. His work foregrounds his grappling with commercial production of images and their reception. His installations are often surprisingly small, the technical equipment is perfectly and precisely designed, and are conceived as part of the work. They are small gems, sparkling, closed systems. On the screens and in the projections Pfeiffer frequently manipulates television recordings of sporting events and other symbols of pop culture that have been broadcast a million times, removing the narrative core of the events depicted, in a laborious manual process using digital technology. The aesthetics of the altered surface are reminiscent of painting and gain depth. Pfeiffer sketches out an aesthetics of absence; the edges of the image are still visible, with their once iconic, now empty, centre. The media code becomes legible.

Pfeiffer’s work results in images consumed every day acquiring a mystical, almost religious charge and pointing us towards completely different contexts of meaning, having been profoundly or imperceptibly changed. The viewer becomes an archaeologist, searching for traces, trying to detect whether anything of the familiar images remains.

carlier | gebauer is showing the most recent video works by the American artist, all from 2004: Empire, Memento Mori, Caryatid (2004), Live Evil (Bucharest) and Sunset Flash.