Swiss artist Andy Denzler creates paintings that are designed to look like the fuzzy image of a paused VHS recording.

The oil paintings -- mostly portraits of people -- aim to reinterpret photography and film stills. Denzler told Wired.co.uk: "I'm pushing the boundaries and possibilities of abstract and photorealism. It's as if I've pressed the fast-forward on a video machine, then hit the pause button, so reality comes to a stand-still. I speed up and slow down the colours. What remains is a distorted moment -- classically painted, oil on canvas -- which, upon closer inspection is very abstract, but from distance looks real."

He first got into the technique in art school where he worked a lot with audio-visual gear. He said: "One day when I was experimenting with abstract composition, I saw colour fields appear on the canvas, like what you get with long exposure times on photography. The effect was as if something was hovering beneath the surface of the paint."


He has been honing the technique in both colour and black-and-white over the last 10 years. In the monochrome pieces, the effect resembles the "snow" of old black-and-white televisions from the 1960s.

According to Denzler, his main challenge is creating a "painting that describes the every day and the monstrous simultaneously" and the "believability of the image".

Check out a gallery of his work below. Denzler has a solo show at Claire Oliver gallery in New York from 8 September.