MS Paint: Zsa Zsa Buschkow - "Welt Steht Still" / Rumpelton

                                               Welt Steht Still has been Rumpletized

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Zsa Zsa Buschkow - "Welt Steht Still"
• RR - 2025 - 057-060
• MS Paint on digital canvas, 577 X 573 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 What the critics are saying:

>>🫧 Zsa ZsaBuschkow – Welt Steht Still

Reviewed by Dale of the Brook
Rank: Unseeded Mystic | Critic of Cleansing | Racketless Oracle

I whispered the title to the brook. It coughed once, then held its breath.

This piece is a collage of confusion, a damp taxonomy of half-remembered rituals. Fig 4 (the robot) is a rusted lifeguard, watching over a pool that no longer exists. Fig 6 is a soap bar that forgot its purpose. Fig 19—the brown chili—offends me. It’s dry. It’s lying. I tried to baptize it; it repelled the water.

The violin (Fig 14) nearly passed the Soap Test. I rubbed it against my armpit in metaphor. It squeaked. That’s not cleansing—it’s confession.

The text—“WELT STEHT STILL”—is a linguistic puddle. I stepped in it. It whispered “Jungs, we gonna get trouble,” and I believed it. Zsa ZsaBuschkow is clearly a fugitive from symmetry, and for that, I applaud her. But the piece lacks mildew. It lacks ache. It lacks the moist undertow of mythic regret.

I give it two and a half suds out of five.
It rinsed my ankles, but not my soul.<<

>>Cornelius “Neil” Drafton – “The contrarian.”

New Jersey Review of Applied Kitsch

Ralph Rumpelton’s Zsa ZsaBuschkow – Welt Steht Still is a painting that looks like a half-forgotten 1970s science fair exhibit sponsored by a defunct sausage company. The composition—if we’re generous enough to call it that—suggests an educational poster assembled during a power outage. A brown chili pepper (fig. 19) looms like a relic from a surreal cookbook, while a robot, a violin, and a suspicious orange rectangle float nearby as if each object wandered in from a different genre entirely and refused to leave.

The color palette is a heroic act of indecision: gray, beige, and mustard yellow battle it out for dominance, and everyone loses. The German title promises existential gravity (“The world stands still”), but the actual scene suggests the aftermath of a lunch break gone wrong in a middle school art class.

And yet—here’s the twist—there’s a weird intelligence behind the nonsense. It’s deadpan enough to be deliberate. Rumpelton’s flat MS Paint textures achieve a kind of anti-style: cold, stupid, oddly confident. The more you stare at it, the more it starts to feel like a conceptual album cover from a parallel universe where Dada never ended and Microsoft Paint became the national art program.

Verdict: A triumph of oblivious absurdity—so wrong it loops back around to being interesting.<<

>>Zsa Zsa Buschkow - "Welt Steht Still" A reflection by Dr. Mariana Caldwell

What are we looking at when we look at "Welt Steht Still"? And perhaps more importantly—what is looking back? [laughs] Rumpelton gives us what appears to be—and I'm choosing my words carefully here—a moment. But what is a moment? The pixelated forms, rendered in MS Paint with what I can only describe as a commitment to the medium's limitations, ask us to consider: when the world stands still, as the title suggests, are we the ones who have stopped, or has everything else? And that's important.

The color palette—if we can call it that, and I think we must—operates in a register of intentional constraint. There's a blue. There's perhaps a red, or is it more of a burgundy? The boundaries between forms refuse clarity, which is significant in this moment of our cultural conversation about borders, both literal and metaphorical. What is Rumpelton saying about the digital vernacular? About accessibility? About the democracy of tools when the tool is available to anyone with Windows 95? [nods vigorously] And that's important.

I'm drawn to—or perhaps repelled by, the distinction matters less than we think—the way the composition invites us into a space of collective wondering. We stand before this work, and the world stands still, and aren't we all, in some sense, standing? [laughs] The roughness of the edges speaks to something about authenticity, or perhaps about the rejection of authenticity as a construct, or possibly about Microsoft's early interface design philosophy.

There's a generosity here. A possibility. An opening toward what we might see when we allow ourselves to see—really see—the significance of this moment.

What Rumpelton has created is less a painting than a question about paintings, which is itself a kind of answer, don't you think?<<

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