Reinhard Riedel — Transience, 2025

Transience (2025) by Reinhard Riedel is a mixed-media work that explores the fragile boundary between photographic realism and painterly interpretation. Combining colored pencils, oil, and acrylic on canvas, the artist creates a layered visual language marked by precision, surface tension, and emotional restraint.

Executed as a modular triptych installation composed of four individual panels, the work unfolds like a cinematic sequence. The interplay of analog painting techniques and digitally influenced composition produces a sense of motion and temporal instability — a “film” constructed in the viewer’s perception rather than on the surface alone.

Riedel’s practice is deeply informed by his background in computer science and mathematics, as well as decades of engagement with craftsmanship and material processes. His figurative realism stands in conscious contrast to abstraction and to the expanding visual dominance of artificial intelligence, asserting the enduring relevance of human observation, manual skill, and physical presence.

Transience exemplifies the artist’s distinctive approach to contemporary figurative painting — where technical complexity, material depth, and narrative sequencing converge into a singular visual experience.