feature
Michael Post-nuclear
raedecker soaP oPeras
In his latest work, the leading Dutch artist mines art historical ruins
to expand the possibilities of painting itself
words MartIn Herbert
we’re standing in front of a recent painting life – using each as a motive for painting that is
by Michael Raedecker, a big pale three-panel equally about the possibilities of painting itself.
affair featuring a ruined French church. And it’s And all this we owe to Winston Churchill.
clear, to hear the artist describe its making, that No, really. The painting of a French ruin is based
the painter’s muse is a wilful one. The Dutch-born, loosely on one of the British statesman’s own
London-based artist set out with a plan for a series – which he, Raedecker believes, in turn based
of paintings based on despoiled architecture. A on one by Sargent. (Another epic production,
necessarily simple idea, since the Raedeckerian slated for Raedecker’s upcoming show at Hauser
aesthetic of lines embroidered on downbeat & Wirth in London, comes from a more minor
backgrounds entails lengthy gestations for each source; a watercolour of Pompeii by eighteenth-
canvas – and during these, says Raedecker, century Frenchman Louis-Philippe Boitte.) But
“things start creeping in”. Those ‘things’ would Churchill also figures at the outset of Raedecker’s
be subconscious feints, instinctive reactions career, reflecting the radical and unelitist openness
and, perhaps most importantly, the capricious to immediate influence that has characterised the
ministrations of chance. This occasion, to hear the Dutchman’s career so far.
artist tell it, was no exception. Having decided not to pursue fashion
The first innovation to manifest itself, after design after taking his BA, Raedecker “just decided
the plan for a suite of paintings was deemed too to be a painter”, and began “going to libraries… and
predictable, was a portmanteau approach – inspired
ah, 2004 (part 1), acrylic and thread on canvas,
researching what I wanted to paint”. Intimidated
by a show of Rauschenberg’s Combines – that
70 x 57 cm. © Hauser & Wirth, Zürich/London.
by art history, he came across a book of Churchill’s
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich/London
split the paintings’ perspective-heavy spaces over paintings. “He wrote an essay called ‘Painting as
multiple canvases. The resultant scuffle between a Pastime’”, Raedecker says now, “and I liked that
seductive depth and active surface, however, is only one of myriad as a starting point; you could be quite stupid. In the early 1990s, you’d
bustling facets the viewer must negotiate. The stitched lines, on wispy read about Richter, the French philosophers, and here was someone
backgrounds, that look uncannily like drawing; the painted dribbles, like just talking about going out into the field and painting because you
weird airborne railings, that offset the wreckage’s feel with levity (since like it. It was a way for me to stick my middle finger up and just start.
some of them are replicated in stitching; a bit of laboriousness that The pastime for me was translated into using embroidery; I copied
could also signal sincerity). And not least, the significance of the subject Churchill’s paintings, then I got bored and started making my own…”
matter – for it’s tempting not only to connect ruination’s softening of Simultaneously, Raedecker had become increasingly aware that
contour to Raedecker’s meandering stitched line, but to consider that “we are bombarded by films and images; as a cultural influence, that
ruins are also by definition fragmentary spaces. and TV have been more important than going to museums, looking
Raedecker enjoys the link. “When I start making a drawing or at art”. The spooked, cinematic feel of his early paintings, American
sketch”, he says, “it’s usually from a painted or photographic source. You modernist bungalows in deserted, placeless landscapes, was, he says,
simplify it, start to leave fragments out. A painting maybe should be “personal and autobiographical, but at the same time it had quite a
incomplete, for the viewer to finish it.” Ruins, additionally, are plundered, collective feel to it, because I think it spoke about feelings that people
just as Raedecker and his contemporaries take the plunder of art history would connect to from our generation”. Consequently he progressed
as a given. The result is painting that reflects upon its own nature inward – “like a camera movement”, he says – from these houses to
as regularly as it entices the viewer into a melancholically romantic, their unpopulated, mouldering interiors; to portraits; to still lifes. In each
constructed space. Less an embodied argument than a zone of optical case, a genre seemed dragged out of time; almost decomposing, but
and conceptual impedimenta to manoeuvre within, it fits easily within also pulsing with unlikely life.
a body of work that has rehearsed, complicated and ambivalently Over the years Raedecker has appeared restless. Even the
darkened a succession of historical genres – landscape, portraiture, still unshakeable melancholia on the surface of his work – evident in
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