Kanjo Také reinvents the collage principle with every episode. He inspires it through extensive associations and makes it closely. His visual material consists of digital photos, which he captures up close around the corner, but also on trips around the world. His archive gathers the ongoing harvest of an insatiable eye, for which a puddle pours out as a torrential environmental catastrophe or individual flower umbels on a pond grow into a thousand-fold branching reflection – my favorite among all the spring pictures since Botticelli is his work “Giverny” (2017 ). Photographic details unfold into expansively moving panoramas, urban silhouettes or distant hill ranges. Contrasts are smoothed, accentuated or tinted. Perspectives shift into each other, fragments of perspective shrink, with extreme sharpness of detail, into tiny sections or expand into cosmic dimensions. In this way, Také’s imagination reveals contexts never seen before and opens up a new perspective on the world.

In all of this, the German-Japanese artist leaves traditional painting behind as well as traditional photography. However, he continues their quintessence by other means. He has the most advanced media sovereign, virtuously uses the keyboard of the computer scale for colored glazes or brightens up by means of solarizations. In contrast to Andreas Gursky, who juxtaposes countless minimal deviations, Také merges his digital montages into baroque world landscapes from evolutionary growths to the financial crisis 2008 (“Mikado”) to end-time doom scenarios. Each sequence is simultaneously an intuitively thought-out train of thought and an impressively composed sequence of images.

Manfred Schneckenburger, Cologne in April 2019

The visual artist Kanjo Také knows how to connect all artistic media with each other. Drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, projections and the use of new media lead to an unprecedented burst of imagination and new images at Také, with which he sees and explains the world anew. The viewer experiences relationships that he previously could only guess at. The world re-visualises itself with great responsibility, it becomes a playground for the imagination, it eludes its pure facts through art.

This works because the artist combines all media with one another. He can combine painting and drawing with photography and the computer, so that the experts and engineers are surprised because the combinations bring to light technical possibilities that were previously considered impossible. Také transforms the image into new abstractions that are made possible by the media connections. The objects mostly lose their original meaning, they regenerate themselves and make other statements that become more active beyond the date.

The artist’s imagination, fed by experiences, emotions, knowledge and aesthetic feeling, invents a new world in which people, landscapes, nature, city, artifacts, philosophy and history and a great deal of knowledge about their histories enter into a new visual alliance. Také is the master of digital painting, the art of the 21st century. His artistic ability guarantees him independence, which allows aesthetic inventions that are unique in today’s media, digital painting and photography. The works prove the special position of the artist.

Dieter Ronte, Bonn in March 2019