“I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and […] affirmed: it’s all over,” wrote the Russian artist Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) about his monochromatic triptych Pure Yellow Color, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color (1921). Regarding the same work, the Productivist art critic Nikolai Tarabukin (1889–1956) added: “And every time an artist really wanted to rid himself of representation, this was achieved only at the cost of destroying painting and committing suicide as a painter.” In other words, to them, “The last picture has been painted.” Last Painting? End of art? Endless end of art? And?

In Dombis’s The Ends of Painting, a video installation shown at the “Futurs Antérieurs” exhibition held in the former chapel of the Jesuit College in Chaumont (France) in 2020, three monochromatic panels cut into the view of the Baroque altarpiece (17th century) by sculptor Claude Collignon. In turn, superimposed on these panels were three video screens displaying a continuous flow of juxtaposed images collected from Google using the search query “the end of painting.” This algorithmically and randomly produced stream of images addresses the question of the endless end of painting. Among the hundreds of thousands of images, littered with flickers and glitches, over three centuries of art history are challenged by this video installation (which, arguably, could be site-specific).

It is noteworthy that the three monochromatic panels — red, blue, and yellow — directly reference Rodchenko’s monochromatic triptych Pure Yellow Color, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color. In fact, “the end of painting” was proclaimed by Russian art critics when Rodchenko’s three small monochromatic oil paintings were exhibited in 1921. The first piece of the contemporary artist’s triptych was neither red, nor a triptych, like Rodchenko’s small canvas discussed by Tarabukin, but a series of blue panels. Before the French artist’s triptychs inspired by Rodchenko’s, and long before the video installation The Ends of Painting (2019), Dombis began his experimentation with monochromatic black-and-white lenticular panels. The blue series came later, around 2011. Since the early 2000s, he has used lenticular panels, randomly creating pixelation or freezing images. The numerous glitches that accompany the process were the result of cross-fading techniques that were too demanding for the computers of the time — leading him to the color blue, which is reminiscent of the Information Age and the Crash. Those born before the 2000s may remember Windows’ “blue screen of death,” a protective measure designed to safeguard hardware, marked by a sudden interruption in computer operations and a warning displayed on an all-blue screen. But whose death are we talking about exactly?

Before the death of art came the death of God. In a private interview, Dombis has said that he began his research with Google Images and other keyword search engines between 2005 and 2010. Initially, his first experiments were associated with the phrase “God is dead,” and then, as a logical development, with the phrase “Art is dead.” The most interesting thing, he commented, is that “basically by searching on ‘the end of painting’ you could build a virtual museum of the entire history of painting, from ancient to contemporary art… whereas if you just search ‘painting,’ you will get mostly painting stuff, tube paint, brush, painting classes.” Nowadays, we no longer talk about painting techniques, style, origin and aura — at the most, about Meta-Aura, as Dombis’ series of algorithmic pieces in pigment print reminds us. Artists like Rodchenko killed them at the exhibition 5×5=25, held in Moscow in September–October 1921. When the Russian revolution started in October 1917, the goal of going beyond painting was already on the agenda and many different directions were possible. The social context determined the course of its disappearance. In the midst of the Revolution and the debate about the construction of a new socialist byt (daily way of life), Russian Constructivist artists proclaimed the end of art, more specifically of painting as a form of representation and of the postulation that the work is an object with a value in itself. Rodchenko’s triptych is nothing more than a blind wall, a plane at the end of the road. “Every plane is a plane and there is to be no more representation,” declared the three small, almost square panels, each painted with a single color. The last step in the process of the steady destruction of the pictorial surface begun by Cézanne (1839–1906) had now been taken.

Of course, in Russia, people continued to paint. However, for the Constructivists, the role of art and artists was no longer to represent life but to act on it and build it. Hence the origin of the name Constructivism, which emphasized the material dimension of art, construction as opposed to composition (characterized by illusionistic operations, such as volumetric effects, depth, rhythmic character, and luminosity). “For the first time, a new word in the field of art came from Russia, not from France.” It is clear that Russian Constructivism should be appreciated through the lens of its historical substrates. The abolition of the traditional artistic domain and the ruin of pure art in Russia became correlated with the development of a new social system, under revolutionary terms. Which, in turn, was not fully accomplished, but, during its waning period, marked by the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it also led to changes of direction in Europe’s ideological and artistic domains. The restriction of the revolutionary horizon was accompanied by multiple ends (the ends of utopias, history, and language), a development that has not ceased to take place since the 1960s, proving that there is indeed no end or beginning. In fact, Dombis’s interactive print installation of 2024 suggests that The End of Art Is Not the End. And in turn, this makes us wonder what end is in question: the end of God? The end of Mankind? The end of Art? And what comes after the end? A flash of light? A stream of images projected in a loop, as the film installation The End(less) proposes? A flood of images as the end of art or as an end in itself? An exploration of the virtual/optical unconscious? Or a counterpoint to AI image generation?

Like Windows’ blue screen of death, Dombis’s work does not celebrate technical and technological development. Through his subversive use of techniques and materials, it interrogates them. Lenticular panels, for example, despite their decorative use for beautiful mainstream 3D posters, compile crashes, defective pixels and glitches. Unending flows of images say much more about blind walls and the inability to grasp reality than about the wonders of AI and robotics.

As an art historian and critic, I would say that, even if it might be a coincidence, it is significant that Rodchenko’s oil painting Pure Red Color (1921) is today “replaced” by a print on blue lenticular panels — monochromatic only in appearance, because when viewed up close, it appears saturated with excessive data overlays and the entire range of Blue, Black and White in varied shapes, forms and patterns. Of course, with Rodchenko, the red version was followed by the yellow and blue ones, whereas Dombis’s blue one was followed by the red and yellow ones. But still, more than a triptych, Dombis’s blue screen assimilates an infinity of ends of the end. In my view linked to its historical substrate, the interactive print installation The End of Art Is Not the End responds with its own lexicon to the prognoses of art in the era of post-technical reproducibility; the blue screen of death as the loss of the ability to be fascinated by what is properly human. The end as a blind wall.

Talking about the “end of painting” in terms of Russian Constructivism inevitably boils down to talking about art as a condensation of a living social context. In Rodchenko’s case, revolutionary ideas were on the agenda; in Dombis’s case, what is? Globalization? Neoliberalism? The endless flow of images? In times of sensory numbness, we see and we see and we see, but we understand nothing, just like the psyche altered by Benjamin’s technical prognosis in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, (1935–36). For him, sensory numbness, as a cognitive response to the occasional shocks of sensory experience, is the foundation of modern experience. He draws our attention to the role/place of the body. It is with our body, more specifically a protective response generated by our neurological apparatus, that we numb ourselves when facing reality. In dialogue with Freud and in his studies on traumas and war neuroses, Benjamin turned the exception into the rule. In these studies, the stressed ego “employs consciousness as a buffer, blocking the openness of the synesthetic system, thereby isolating present consciousness from past memory. Without the depth of memory, experience is impoverished”, as Buck-Morss explained in 2012. Thus, to protect ourselves from contemporary physical and psychic traumas and shocks (the jolt in the movements of machines; the crowds; the flow of images), we operate an inverted function of the synesthetic apparatus, the cognitive block and the sensorial experience — no longer absorbing it but repelling it. Wouldn’t the blind wall of art in the era of advanced capitalism be a product of the inability to grasp experience? If so, the plane and the absence of representation are configured here by the excess of data, images, “ends” etc., and not by the description of the pictorial organism. But before concluding, and we are heading towards the end of this present-saturated present, I would like to reflect a little more on ‘and.’

In the philosophical essay La fin des fins, Jean Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari dwell on the stopping point ‘and’. According to them, the ‘and’ which can be found between the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ has no beginning or end. What if there were no possible end or beginning, but only endless sharing, they wonder. Life, death, art, time, space… everything is nothing more than “sharing a final scene that repeats itself infinitely, but that divides space and time in two.” If so, in the film installation The End(less), but also in the video installation The Ends of Painting, the beginning and the end would be up to the viewer. If beginnings and ends are nothing more than breaks in continuous flows of images, it is the time of the viewer’s physical presence in front of the work that delimits the duration of sharing, thus the end and beginning of the work. It is beautiful to think that each viewer, through their physical presence (in time and space), is the protagonist of the infinite possible endings and beginnings, that never stop ending.

And here we come to the ace in the hole: the end belongs to the viewer.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 186 to 190, essay by Clara Figueiredo