From Suburban Canvas Quarterly, Fall 1979

 

Move over Hyperrealism — the camera already won.

This season’s most confusing development isn’t another chrome bumper painted to look like it was photographed by NASA. It’s something far more unstable: Rumpeltonian Cubism.

While hyperrealists spend 400 hours rendering a bead of sweat so convincing you want to wipe it off the canvas, the Rumpeltonian approach dares to ask:
What if the sweat bead had stage fright? What if the face shifted mid-pose? What if perspective called in sick?

Hyperrealism worships the lens.
Rumpeltonian Cubism breaks it and rearranges the shards.

Where the hyperrealist hides brushstrokes like a guilty secret, Rumpeltonian Cubism leaves fingerprints, smudges, and the occasional existential wobble. Noses don’t sit politely. Eyes negotiate new coordinates. Reality is less “captured” and more “interviewed under bright lights.”

Critics are divided. Some call it error.
Others call it rebellion.

We call it the first honest response to a decade obsessed with polish.

Because in a world determined to look perfect, nothing feels more radical than a painting that admits it was made by a human being.

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.