Julius HOFMANN | foreverglad(e)

FOREVERGLAD(E) – Paradise.exe

The painters of Romanticism approached the landscape with reverence. Nature was the sublime, the divine—something that humans had to approach with humility. Julius Hofmann looks at the same landscape, yet his eye is a different one: trained on pixels, renderings, and the simulated worlds of digital screens. What he sees is not nature, but its image—and whether there is still a reality behind it, he deliberately leaves open. One does not know whether one is encountering a real landscape or a virtual reality that merely pretends to be one.

The gaze as a dimension of power. The isometric perspective, which determines five of the seven image pairs, is not a humble view from below—it is the view from above, the gaze of a god, a gamer, or a Shahed-136. The viewer is placed in a position that the Romantic painter would never have claimed.

Hofmann’s tableaus operate at the interface of cartography, 2D game aesthetics, and painterly gesture. The works adopt the grid of a strategic playing field, yet shift it into a visual language that is neither fully illusionistic nor purely graphic. A field of tension emerges that recalls the conflict between skeuomorphism and material design: spaces, paths, and objects are staged in a way that evokes GUIs and level maps—and yet brushstrokes, organic materiality, and hesitant irregularity contradict the smooth logic of the digital.

Seven pairs of paintings form the core of the exhibition. Spring and winter, each juxtaposed—yet the contrast is not one of seasons, but of two states of aggregation of the imaginary. The spring images breathe the artificial idyll of the Windows XP era: lush, almost toxic green, light without shadow, a nature that has never frozen and never will. It is the landscape as promise, as the desktop background of a world that never existed in this way. The winter landscapes respond with quiet sharpness. Snow-covered surfaces, devoid of people, in a light that illuminates less than it bleaches. Civilization appears not absent, but entirely vanished—only fragments of walls, worn paths, and garden design bear witness to its former existence.

Amid these desolate, humanless scenes, a diptych embodies the opposing poles of life and death. In the first panel, Save State (left), a couple stands with their backs turned, positioned to the left and right of a tree—a nod to Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic Rückenfiguren, while also evoking a Y2K-inspired take on the Fall of Man. Hofmann blends this sleek style with his own stark, painterly counterpoints. The tree bears a cheerful face in its trunk, while the indulgently lush green of the hills and the brutal blue of the sky appear almost dull, as if the world were already too perfect to be real. The second image Save State (right) responds with apocalyptic force: a skeleton lies on the ground. The tree no longer smiles—its wide-open mouth looks like a black hole from which a lament seems to emanate. A kamikaze drone has become entangled in its crown, and at its roots lies a small Purple Heart. To the right, the rudiment of a camouflage uniform. The background glows in yellow and orange, as if the world were perishing in a nuclear catastrophe.

Despite the dark aura, Hofmann creates an enchanted atmosphere and captures timeless moments of complete stillness. In the image Mallorcan Landscape (Mallorquinische Landschaft), he depicts the beauty and serenity of a gently rushing waterfall and masters this dynamic effect masterfully with a few brushstrokes. The moon-illuminated winter landscape generates, through the nocturnal silence and the moisture of the expressionist snow, an atmosphere reminiscent of a kind of fourth dimension. Two opposing poles—the analogue craft and the digital artifacts—also find themselves in Hofmann’s painterly translation. An interplay between showing and not showing. Simplified, collage-like elements meet multifaceted textures and detailed components, such as the traditional Mallorcan dry-stone walls. Hofmann knows how to draw the viewer under his spell with all his painterly refinements—and creates a romantic dystopia and his very own post-digitalism.

Michaela Kühn