Christian Jankowski's series New Painting consists of 54 canvases of different sizes mounted on frames, most of which have been painted in rich, vibrant colours.  What they all have in common is their figurative depiction, a greyishbrown margin–which shows the bare, unprimed picture plane–and, above all an intentional referentiality. Some of the motifs seem strangely familiar, and to achieve this impression Jankowski has searched the Internet for re-stagings of famous paintings. He calls these images tableaux vivants and sends the digital files to a community of applied painters in Dafen (Shenzhen-region, China) with the assignment to transfer these into paintings to the size of the original masterpiece. The motif, once borrowed from a painting is thus re-staged in a performance, captured in a photograph and then transferred back into a painting. It is unlikely the painters themselves have knowledge of the original source, given they earn their living by copying all kinds of pictures, and have rarely had an artistic education.  Thus, these copyists inadvertently create discrepancies to the original source material as they aim for a photorealist representation that is true to the digital image they work to. 

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The result of this production chain polarizes: some critics call the works fakes or even speak of an abuse of the art that provides the canonical models for the paintings. My paper examines the relationship between photography, digitality and painting in this work and how they  intertwine. To do this, I will concentrate on the translation processes. It is the quality of this work that both the motif and its realization can be deduced. The traces of the various production steps can be seen on the surface of each final painting: the composition principles are borrowed from the models of the artists who inspired the title (for example Géricault), the depiction owes its existence to the tableaux vivants photographed, and the style of painting results from the inadequate translatability of a photograph into painting. These layers densify the painting into a palimpsest: not only as something reused or altered while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form, but also as a bearer of different levels of meaning. It can be seen that reproductions—whether digital or analogue—always create a new, independent work when media transfer takes place. 

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Jankowski's series is thus closer to a Chinese understanding of the creative appropriation and appreciative emulation of art than to the traditional Western fetishization of the original. A similar shift in values is taking place in the digital world of the Internet, where the significance of the original is becoming increasingly complicated: being intangible and at the same time omnipresent. Thus, the images become formulae that anyone can appropriate, be it in a creative act or as a commissioned copy that can be hung in the living room. The questions of devaluation and appreciation touch equally on the questions of inclusion and exclusion, with the result that digitality in this series is to be recognized especially as a social factor.