Bestiaries between folk art and the command line.

RABE – born Christian Eickelberg, online as Rabentinte – paints bestiaries. Wolves with too many heads, panthers full of stars, dragons in prison stripes, skeletons in hats, suns with faces. The animals wear chequered blankets and carry riders: lizards, cats, sun-headed figures, usually in threes, rarely with a visible destination. The grounds are flat and loud – yellow, peach, mint –, the paint sits thick and rough, the outline is as hard as on a playing card.

At first glance this is folk art: frontal, ornamental, without perspective, with the directness of votive panels. At second glance you start reading. Between the figures there are marginal notes: "format c:/", "q.e.d.", "LUCK:99", "ordo / chao", "divide et impera", "no kings", "disobey". One signature reads count(egodeath). Alchemical signs sit next to command lines, slogans next to game stats, Godzilla next to Cerberus. The paintings are built like a browser with too many open tabs – and still work as icons.

The biography explains the mix. Raised in North Rhine-Westphalia near the Dutch border, between farmland and the Ruhr, on animal books and volumes about lost civilisations. Left school at 17; instead of art school, years of shamanic practice. In his mid-twenties, living in Switzerland, he returned to painting – the works from that period are held as a group in a private collection in Munich; everything else he painted over. A few weeks later he was homeless. Brandenburg and Berlin followed. He taught himself both painting and programming.

That the same hand writes code and paints demons is something RABE no longer treats as a contradiction. Trance and syntax are, for him, two ways of doing the same work: arranging signs so that something is set in motion. Painting is the place where myth, meme, the news cycle and humour have to share one surface.

All of it feeds on nineties pop culture, internet culture, daily politics, esotericism, science, music – and on hours-long walks through Berlin at night, where RABE lives and works. His works are held in private collections in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. They are bought strikingly often by people who work with sign systems for a living: musicians, computer scientists, historians, journalists, doctors, scientists.