feAture michael raedecker
Unshakeable melancholia sits
on the surface of his work,
characterised by him as not sadness
but a kind of thoughtfulness
productions such as the furred dinner-for-one This assuredly has bearing on Raedecker’s
meal setting of the 2005 still life Therapy, the capacity to paint a washing line, or a mottled
greenish and submerged empty bedroom of beach towel, and make them both visual fields
Sensoria (2002) around which float tumbleweed- that one can disappear into and images that
like twists of twine – is characterised by him speak freely to art history. Raedecker’s paintings
as not sadness but a kind of thoughtfulness. of cloth bristle with inference, and economically
“I think you can experience melancholy when so. That they speak of his roots in haberdashery is
you’re essentially happy about how things are, perhaps the least interesting aspect. Angling itself
and therefore you can take a reflective position,” downward over three canvases, his washing line
he says. Inquisitiveness may be his habitual – pale stitched lines on a washed-out background
mode, which in turn could account for his work’s – is an abstraction, a landscape, a close-up of a
changeability. A 2005 exhibition featured not only horse’s neck: the references flicker and fluctuate. It
a greater emphasis on flower paintings, but also ah is huge and engulfing with the delicacy of a sketch.
(2004), a double portrait of Hitler – a work whose Sourced from a 1970s book of photographs of
repetition emphasised the struggle involved, laundry blowing in the breeze entitled Clotheslines
and its overcoming, in making a painting of the USA, it’s also a meditation on the minimal
dictator. What was clear, here, is that Raedecker abstraction that flourished in the same era; and
is an old-fashioned painter in that he has two real as so often with Raedecker, a dance between the
subjects: the one depicted in a given work, and the
ah, 2004 (part 2), acrylic and thread on canvas, 70 x 58 cm.
specifics of surface and the portrayed illusion.
larger subject – ie, the potentials of the medium at
© Hauser & Wirth, Zürich/London.
“I’m treating the canvas almost like a
any given time.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich/London
monochrome, one that’s made by the washing
“What can we still paint? One reason why itself,” he says. “The three panels are the size of
I painted Hitler”, says Raedecker, “was, ‘am I allowed to do this?’ And it a normal sheet; the material I use, stitching, is also the material the
was kind of a provocation. Maybe with the flower painting it’s the same. sheets are made from, but the way I use it is to give the sheets shape,
As a serious painter, maybe you’re not supposed to do flowers, but body, light and shade; it’s not necessarily mimicking the material.” At
these days, cynicism and irony are entirely permissible – and so easy. the same time, this painting is going to be exhibited alongside a ruin
What if you use [flowers] from a serious perspective but still try to do painting, embroideries of maudlin, wilted flowers – a Dutch flower
something with it – which reflects on painting and how we look at things, painting left to die as the flowers would have done, rather than paused
how things that are done from the past seem to have more value in an artificial moment of perfection – and a new ‘bungalow’ painting.
than things that are done today?” As such, Raedecker implicitly opposes A semi-domestic narrative hesitantly drafts itself, one Raedecker
an artist such as Luc Tuymans, a self-proclaimed ‘last painter’ closing describes as “not very congruous” before approvingly quoting a friend’s
the door on a bankrupt medium. The deeper history of Raedecker’s characterisation of it as “a post-nuclear soap drama”.
perseverance, though, is a return to human verities through which That’s great, I say. “It’s great, whatever it means,” says Raedecker.
all the arts, most notably literature and classical music, have gone And considering his ongoing assembly of ensnarling but pointedly
since the dismemberments of Modernism. “Forty, fifty years ago”, ‘incomplete’ canvases – vivid challenges to the dangerously prevalent
he says, “painting was deconstructed in such a way that there was only notions that painting should either drop dead or limit itself to simplistic
a bunch of stretchers lying in a corner – that was what a painting had to messages – one might confidently suggest the same about his art.
come to. It was almost like a scientific research. But of course there is still
this need to portray something, to picture something. Every generation New work by Michael Raedecker is on show at Hauser & Wirth, London,
needs to discover their own time, their own necessities.” until 27 October
Artreview 90
Raedecker.indd 4 7/9/07 09:54:58
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