Setting: The dimly lit Salon de Refusés, a private members' club in an undisclosed European city. Two figures sit in leather armchairs before the projected image of Ralph Rumpelton's Bill Evans - Autumn Leaves. A carafe of sherry stands untouched between them.
DR. ALOYSIUS FINKLE: Norbert, I must confess—when you insisted we convene to discuss this... Rumpelton, I anticipated another of your exercises in deliberate provocation. Yet here I sit, genuinely arrested. The economy of line! The chromatic restraint! This is not mere pastiche; this is a kind of anti-portraiture.
DR. NORBERT F. VENSMIRE: In extremis, Aloysius, in extremis. What you perceive as economy, I identify as strategic depletion. Rumpelton has stripped Evans not merely of photographic verisimilitude but of the entire Romantic apparatus that has calcified around the jazz pianist as cultural icon. The slouch—note the slouch!—is Giacomettian in its existential weight.
FINKLE: Giacometti via Microsoft Paint. A curious genealogy, but I take your point. The posture does suggest a certain... gravitational despair. And yet, the hands! Look at how Rumpelton renders the hands at the keyboard. They are almost spectral—neither fully present nor absent. It's as though Evans is dissolving into the music itself.
VENSMIRE: Precisely! The left hand, qua left hand, functions as a synecdoche for the entire improvisational act. It is both there and not-there, fixed and fluid. Rumpelton understands what the academy refuses to acknowledge: that pixelation is not a failure of technique but a confession of epistemological humility. We cannot capture Evans. We can only gesture toward the shadow he cast.
FINKLE: [adjusting his spectacles] I'm struck by the background—that negative space rendered in what I can only describe as a kind of... textured void. It's as though Rumpelton has filled the emptiness with the ghosts of all the notes Evans never played. The choices not made. This is Cage's 4'33" given visual form.
VENSMIRE: Ah, but you're being too generous, my friend. That background is not silence—it is noise. Digital noise. The MS Paint spray tool, deployed with what some might call reckless abandon, becomes here a metaphor for the jazz club itself: smoky, indistinct, a space where clarity is suspect. Rumpelton rejects the tyranny of the vector in favor of the bitmap's honest graininess.
FINKLE: [leaning forward] And the color palette? That institutional beige for the jacket, the Kelly green sidebar bearing Evans's name in that brutalist sans-serif... This is not accident, Norbert. This is choice. The green—it speaks to the album title, obviously, but also to a kind of visual dissonance. It shouldn't work, yet it does. Like a flatted fifth resolving into something unexpectedly consonant.
VENSMIRE: Sui generis, entirely sui generis. The green functions as a chromatic interruption, a violation of good taste that paradoxically elevates the composition. And observe—at the top, that peculiar orange banner, the "JAZZ TIME" badge with its Twitch logo. Rumpelton is embedding this work within the discourse of streaming culture, collapsing the distance between the 1950s salon and the contemporary digital salon. Evans becomes content. Content becomes Evans. The dialectic is complete.
FINKLE: You're suggesting this is... intentionally anachronistic? A commentary on the flattening of temporal experience in the digital age?
VENSMIRE: I'm suggesting that Rumpelton has achieved what Warhol only dreamed of: the democratization of the image through its degradation. This is not Pop Art; this is Post-Post-Pop. The signature—"Ralph Rumpelton" in that unassuming Helvetica at the bottom—functions as both authorial claim and ironic disclaimer. "Yes," it says, "I made this in MS Paint. What of it?"
FINKLE: [chuckling] You know, there's a peculiar intimacy to works like this. They bypass the entire apparatus of artistic credentialing. No gallery stamp, no oil on canvas provenance. Just a human being, a primitive digital tool, and a desire to... what? Honor Evans? Mock the solemnity with which we approach genius?
VENSMIRE: Both. Neither. The question itself is a bourgeois trap. Rumpelton's Evans exists between reverence and irreverence, in that productive space where sincerity and satire become indistinguishable. The MS Paint aesthetic is not a limitation—it is a liberation. It says: "You need not be anointed to respond to greatness. You need only respond."
FINKLE: [pausing, swirling sherry in his glass] I find myself moved by this interpretation, though I suspect I'll wake tomorrow wondering if you've hoodwinked me entirely. But perhaps that's the point. Perhaps Rumpelton's genius—and I use that term advisedly—lies in making us question whether genius is even the appropriate metric.
VENSMIRE: Aloysius, you've finally grasped it. The work succeeds not despite its crude execution but through it. In an age of 4K perfection and algorithmic smoothing, Rumpelton gives us the jagged edge, the visible pixel, the evidence of the hand. This is punk rock masquerading as portraiture. This is rebellion wearing the mask of homage.
FINKLE: Then let us raise a glass to rebellion. And to Ralph Rumpelton—whoever he may be.
VENSMIRE: [lifting his glass] To Rumpelton. And to the beautiful, terrible truth that MS Paint might outlast us all.
[Both men drink. The image glows on the wall behind them, Bill Evans forever bent over his keyboard, trapped in pixels, free in interpretation.]
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