Art Kindle: What are the similarities of these paintings?

They are both very dark and draw you in. They cause you to want to look deeper--

Matt Price on re-title.com discusses Ghenie as, "Ghenie plunders visual history via disparate avenues - archives, history books, cinema, painting, YouTube and Google - to build his dense, multi-layered paintings. His preparations are intriguing in their ebb and flow between fact and fabrication. Once images are selected from different modes of representation, Ghenie creates collages with printed images that are overworked and embellished in paint. Sometimes he turns stills into cardboard models, creating a kind of mini film set, tangible, with shifting light and relative scale.

Cinema’s aesthetic preoccupies Ghenie, particularly the moment cinema developed its own unique qualities: when scenes were created, seen and understood as nothing but filmic – movement, light, structure, genre, and moments repeated in different productions to the point of cliché that could not be separated from that medium, just as the surface and qualities of a Caravaggio can only really exist in paint. "

Michaël Borremans

      Automat (I)
   2008
   80,0 x 60,0 cm
   oil on canvas

"The films, paintings, and drawings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (°1963) overwhelm the viewer through the use of deceleration, precision and vortex. His seductive works contain timeless images of inner drive and external force, of the latent pressure involved in being human. Behind a veil of stylistic perfection, the artist simulates common rituals of interpretation and meaning. His intensely atmospheric images are puzzles involving political and psychological patterns of perceiving the world, which oscillate in a camouflaging, fragile way between inexorable realism and nebulous distance."

-Zeno X Gallery- Michaël Borremans Biography

More paintings by Adrian Ghenie: