ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Hans Rudolf Reust

That Raoul Pictor is a painter is obvious. Wearing a black beret and the white smock of his profession, he paces back and forth in his studio in search of inspiration, from the stool to the bookshelf to the table where a wineglass stands and then over to the easel. Wildly, he dunks a thick brush and begins to paint, accompanied by the sounds of splattering pigment. By the time he takes his masterpiece down from the easel and carries it off, we've still seen only the back of the canvas--and, indeed, we can only view the completed artwork by printing it out. With Raoul Pictor, Herve Graumann has created a virtual painter who pursues the aura of the painted original via the random constellation of a computer-generated image. With the click of a mouse, our dear painter will paint as many pictures as we like. The auctorial gesture of painting serves to animate the black-box image production of the computer processor, which is ultimately invisible. The computer as artist, assuming it has an intelligence distinguishable from the designs of its programmers, wears every face and no face at all. So why not the one under the beret of a Montmartre painter?

At the exhibition in Geneva, this piece, Raoul Pictor cherche son style ... (Raoul Pictor searches for his style), 1993, could be navigated from the sofa in a small lounge, bringing a living-room mode of perception into the museum while ironizing the aesthetics of image consumption in the '90s. (...)

Hans Rudolf Reust Translated from German by Sara Ogger.
Excerpt / Artforum International Magazine, Inc. - 2003