Visual Metabolism | Robert Langenegger

The world has ceased to be in accordance, according to Robert Langenegger’s world.

His own visual algorithm is a menace that can put generative AI and internet search engines to the test:

Balinese rainbow weddings; a blind man singing karaoke against a backdrop of lechon; a fossilized

human skeleton making love with another skeleton—a bird’s; and an imagined group portrait as the only

living proof of paleolithic orgy.

These are just some of the images from Langenegger’s world that not only befuddle the history of images

but also provoke our thinking about certain histories. These are scenes that may have never existed in

the real world, but nevertheless do not defy the possibility. In rich detail, and in an endearing yet

grotesque approach to realism, the paintings of Langenegger induce the opposite of historical

documents—which is impossible to find. Nothing is ‘unhistorical,’ is what is seemingly conveyed in this

case. But nothing in history is also immune to speculation, and these speculative prompts that might

reside in the underbelly of encyclopedic entries appear to sometimes just wait for the right moment to be

seen—as in here, the moment the artist’s own generative mind is pitted against natural language and

descriptions.

And then you add to the mix: the lowkey, subculture of breeding racing pigeons—birds who were stars

and icons in their own right. Go ahead and search for them. Their histories have been part of a long

struggle, as well. Their flight from mere existence to stardom has become a symbol on its own. Like how,

once upon a time, they were symbols of peace. History—like the marks of bird droppings, are made

known only at the right moment, in a specific time and place, and are only felt when they hit you in the

face.

Bird droppings as history, as sign, and as subtle markings against the growing distance between surface

and sky, and also according to Langenegger—as just plain shittery—find their own symbolic significance

when one begins to think about the sophisticated lives of the gents who breed them, and the astonishing

culture that can be found within. Furthermore-–bird droppings as pigment: as also one of the greatest

things a sophisticated artist could aspire for.

Absurdity, ambiguity, and abstruseness—recently they have become the substance of generative AI when

we try to summon text combinations to conjure something that can appear as real. But in Robert

Langenegger’s world, this was his way to simply create images. For many years now, his mind has

worked as a kind of image generator long before the engine gained prominence—pitting the real against

the perverse; juxtaposing history against the speculative.

The metabolism involved in conjuring such images—one can only imagine the data to accompany this:

the number of calories burned, the brain’s energy consumption, the photoelectric light that passes through

the visual cortex—such a chore, one would probably think. But it is, after all, human. A human’s chore.

And in this particular moment, it is Robert’s.

/CLJ