Jerónimo Rüedi at Galerie Nordenhake Berlin

Jerónimo Rüedi's works reject representational maneuvers and transcend categories. His is a notably different approach from the current landscape of figurative painting, one of immediate interpretation and, at times, literal narratives. In his unique artistic process — rooted in a sophisticated conceptual basis developed over decades — Rüedi progressively moves away from figuration as a form of mediation with the world, to generate paintings and encaustics that emphasize presence over image. Rüedi paints against the grain of what is immediately identified as painting and considers the medium as the language itself. The painting’s frail traces, like condensed scribbles on notepads, are like records of truncated acts, pointless journeys, and fleeting thoughts that come across during the artist’s creative grapple with the empty surfaces of his canvases. Rüedi, interested in both the craftsmanship of making and the reception of his work, has developed unorthodox methods that captivate the viewer’s gaze and body. He elaborates seemingly deep surfaces to compose a cosmology — or a language — that rejects artifices from Euclidian representation, vanishing lines, and perspective. His atemporal oeuvre, committed to contemporaneity, resonates with abstract artists such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky and Cy Twombly; while nodding to Chinese handscroll painting, cave paintings, and the baroque Chiaroscuro; and incorporates interests sprung from science, syntax, literature, and Zen spirituality. Originally trained as a sculptor, Rüedi primes his canvases and prepares his paints from the very beginning using raw materials, like resins, beeswax, pigments, binders; each artistic object emerging from a meticulous time-based process. Its elements, arranged in a balance, are reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s (1933-1984) animated drawings on celluloid. Behind the random shapes floating like bioluminescent organisms, lies a controlled gesture that aims to escape order and predictability. Jerónimo Rüedi moves within ambiguity: his opaque paintings confound the senses as if they were backlit with the ability to emit a light that is nothing but phantasmagoric. In the same manner as his works, the exhibition title And Between us Occurs the Following Conversation leaves us with more inquiries than certainties. It echoes the incomplete nature of the absurd and failed message from these beings-paintings more akin to atonal music than to image. Their atmospheric sensuousness that reaches beyond the visible is the enigma that makes us go back to Jerónimo Rüedi’s works repeatedly, seeking answers that return to the works as fragmented questions.