“No Undo Button: The Rumpelton Heresies”

 

        

Excerpted from The Unstable Image: Essays on Visual Collapse (Third Printing)

There is no clean entry point into Ralph Rumpelton’s work. You don’t view a Rumpelton—you fall into it. Like a sidewalk giving way, or a jazz solo that forgets the key and keeps going out of sheer conviction.

His reinterpretation of The Other Side of Abbey Road is not a painting. It is a digital panic attack rendered in asphalt gray and van-shaped dread. George Benson marches forward, unaware he’s trapped in a 32-bit dimension where the sky forgot how to gradient. Buildings lean in, either applauding or begging him to stop.

Perspective is obliterated. Proportions laugh at you. Depth is a rumor.

You can feel the mouse hand trembling. Not with uncertainty—but with purpose. Rumpelton doesn’t correct, doesn’t erase, doesn’t apologize. He lets the smudge speak. He lets the smudge preach. You think this is a mistake? No, friend. This is doctrine.

“I don’t fix it because it’s already true,” he told no one, ever. But you feel like he did.

Where others chase fidelity, Rumpelton chases the ghost—the echo of the album cover you think you remember, from a half-slept nap in 1996 with jazz radio on in the background. This isn’t homage. This is ritual distortion.

There are no drafts in Rumpelton. Only consequences.

And that is why he matters.

— Gordy Lax,
Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Fractured Realities
Barstow Institute of Misremembered Media