... The artist uses the paint to process manually the photographic mass commodity in which the once legitimate dreams of human beings are locked up, repeating manually what PopArt had left to be done mechanically- namely, the execution of multiple variations on a single image (as in silk-screen printing). In other words, the artist makes his person into a machine, on the one hand, while giving the machine subjective presence, on the other. Thus he retrieves the dreames which had become so distanced in painting owing to the latter's false aura and bring them back to the closer everyday world, without allowing them to become merely banal there. A kind of negativ aura sets in: immediacy with distance, availability without attainability, presence which is also absence. In other words, what is generated is something commonly called a phantom, a phenomenon that is unreal but appears entirely real, the absolute reality of fiction. ...
Rappenecker's phantom painting is a painting of symptoms, a symptomatic reading of the fate of contemporary reality and its image art: phantom-like, threatened by disappearence and yet borne by the triumphe of the subject over the world (of the reproduction media).