In Siegfried Fruhauf’s dream-like etude, human traces from an unimaginably distant past appear as an intensified vision of the origin of painting. Cave Painting leads us to real natural phenomena that have been shaped by civilization. A seemingly spherical thunderstorm of individual images leads us to a rock face whose interior opens pulsatingly. The dizzying expedition along rock structures and cavities is increasingly determined by colors, contrasting lighting, three-dimensional effects, and illusions of movement. Fruhauf celebrates the movie screen in a loose way, following the example of Robert Smithson – namely, as a place of flickering apparitions whose blurred, floating perception is due to a specific environment. He understands the cinema experience as cave exploration. 
In a virtuoso condensation of photochemical shots, the filmmaker abstracts from images of what has been found or already reproduced, which he deforms into an imaginary exploration of a stalactite grotto. In the cave’s virtually organic-looking interior, hand negatives emerge, the oldest evidence of art. In turn, black imprints tremble as a manual signature of the present. Light painting and drawings scratched onto film are the artist’s physical engagement in a dance with prehistoric representations. In a pyrotechnic display of digital animation, fantastic contours appear deepened, solarized, rotating, superimposed on one another. Finally, the famous “Spotted Horses” flash up between the layers of the image as the distant reflection of a Stone Age cave painting. We can sense the luck of archaeology: each material element of a discovery can contain entire worlds and, together with other fragments, awaken hitherto unimagined ideas.
(Christa Blumlinger)

It’s all the rage to evoke spectacular ‘immersive’ cinema today, but nothing matches the immersion effect of a Siegfried A. Fruhauf film. Agglomerating the textures of cave surfaces with the material traces of filmic processes, Cave Painting offers a trippy visual and sonic journey for the senses that evokes an avant-garde, grunge version of the psychedelia in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oydssey. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss something good. As always, Fruhauf conjures a new world.

(Adrian Martin)

Cave paintings collide with cinema in this breathtakingly immersive trip through space, sound and film texture. Austrian avant-garde wizard Siegfried A. Fruhauf presents an extraordinary work of formalist collage, tracing the earliest images of human cave art via light painting, celluloid scratching, stop motion and the digital animation of the 21st century. Cave Painting is an immersive kaleidoscope of sound and vision that looks to the future by drawing on the ancient past.

(MIFF - Melbourne International Film Festival)

The human desire to leave a mark in Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s Cave Painting.

As far as we know, humans are the only species on the planet who feel the need to accumulate memory outside their brains. From cave paintings to cinema, art has long been used as a way to observe, remember and to say; “I exist”. This desire to leave a mark on the world is explored in Siegfried Fruhauf’s latest, a mesmerising spelunking expedition through time; taking the audience from the dawn of human self-consciousness to the death of celluloid. There’s a peculiar magic to Fruhauf’s work, and the way he stitches images of cave paintings together to create the illusion of movement has an incantatory effect; no more so than when we see the first outline of a human hand. The scientist Jacob Bronowski believes that these handprints were an attempt by our ancestors to say “'This is my mark. This is man,” and when the first of these human hands emerges from the screen it feels like witnessing the precise moment the modern human mind was born.

(Patrick Gamble - ALT/KINO)