Slowly, very slowly run your hand along the crazy, sensually senseless tail fins of these icons of the 50s, which plow through our haptic perception, razor sharp like the bow of an America’s Cup yacht cutting through
blue waters.

Now open your eyes again.
And look at Manfred Rieker’s images. There it is. Here, there is no need for the imagination to artificially superimpose any verbal pathos onto the reality. It reproduces reality.

 

Turn off the lights and close your eyes.

The objects have been captured in an entirely analogue process, with a Sinar large-format camera and without editing in Photoshop or digital Botox of any kind. However, this individual — we won’t call him a light artist, but a singular aesthete of light — has abandoned himself so unconditionally to his passion that the genuinely photographed automobiles in his pictures seem like supernaturally aesthetic objects from another world.

The light seems to have been composed with an eyeliner brush, the shadows interpreted in Full Metal Shadow look, the contours remodeled, the baby pink of the Eldorado brought out with a delicate softness like that of a beauty artist from YSL. His photographs are magnificent aesthetic glimpses of light and they magically grab our attention. This is also high art.