“I’m a liar, but a good one”, Simon Lehner states. The title involves questions of memory, truth, trauma, authorship and artistic production that are expressed in a reduced setting of four works. There is no classical photography to be seen; instead, the wall objects and animations seem to be related to painting.

The source material of his works, anchored in the autobiographical – mostly bound photographs from the artist’s childhood and youth constitute the foundation of a inverted pictorial genesis. In this manner Simon Lehner forges a working process that arises out of the dialog between memories and consciousness.

From the transformation of personal photo archives into newly interpreted digital spaces, he generates singular leitmotifs that manifest themselves as alter ego, petrol station, cave, table or television. These constellations of images, always somewhat varying and mined from the archive, coalesce in diverse combinations into two- or three-dimensional surfaces, ultimately to be painted by a robot.

At every stage of the production process, small lacunae emerge. On the one hand, these convey to the works a quality that is very close to a painterly style. On the other hand algorithmic processes function as prostheses of the artist’s way of thinking; one can even ascribe to them a strong similarity to human mechanisms of remembering. Here arises that which the eponymous lying suggests: the act of painting, that is no ‘genuine’ painting, is juxtaposed with the software as a neurological pendant of remembering.