Mise en scènes 1997

Solo Exhibition, 21.11 -20.12.1997,
Galerie Karlheinz Meyer, Karlsruhe, Germany

Everyone has them, those postcards of art bought as souvenirs on trips to the museum, aide-mémoire of a favourite work, or, for some, simple testimony that the visit has been made. These postcards rarely get written on or posted to friends and relations: they are of a different order to tourist cards, too significant to be parted with, yet strangely inefficacious. They accumulate into a pile, silently treasured in the back of a drawer or gathering dust on a studio table.

Andreas Rüthi paints paintings of his postcards: enigmatic little still life in which the image takes centre stage, on a shelf, accompanied by one or two small objects. From youthful crushes - Freuds’ Bacon portrait, a Hockney Splash - to time-honoured icons - Degas, Bellini, Velasquez, Cranach, Gainsborough - to modern rarities - a Broodthaers plastic sign, a Koons sculpture - Rüthi’s collection of art cards is catholic. It has inspired in the region of fifty paintings and the series continues to grow. There is no reason for it to end, after all, for visits to museums continue, and new cards consummate new affections. Even previously overlooked images - such as Johns’ Target - may suddenly resonate with new meaning for Rüthi. Others, favourites, are painted more than once. There is a strangely tautologous logic here, for as Rüthi says, “if you love paintings, it makes sense to paint paintings”. But it is not the logic of the exhaustive document, the full picture, for how could you define where this desire for art should begin or end? Rather like another compulsive serialist - Jean Frédéric Schnyder’s endless en plain air paintings off motorways bridges and in the train station waiting-rooms - these are paintings which celebrate art through the very making of painting.

Rüthi paints in the dead of the night, when the house is quiet. One of his cards is propped on a narrow shelf, leant against the white wall as if about to be hung in a museum. Another object, maybe two, congregate next to it, like viewers in that museum. Small in scale, and often undistinguished, these objects tend to heighten the complexity of the postcard image. A matchbox, a child’s miniature toy, a dead beetle, a pie funnel bought on a day trip, an eye bath, a jar of vaseline, an ashtray, a Swiss army compass from his days of national service: these are the ornaments and objects of an individual life, their meanings intimate, tied to the domestic sphere in which the paintings are created. Their relationship with the postcard is often hermetic. Sometimes purely formal - in the way, for example, an ornament of an upturned ladies boot echoes the graceful arm of Bellini’s Young Woman at her toilet - sometimes triggered by a complex train of association.

Rüthi paints his delicate mise en scènes of postcards and objects from up close. He calls them still life paintings. The dynamic tilting planes beloved of the Modernist traditions are absent: here, all is simply, quietly frontal. They are observed und a bright white fluorescent light which has the effect of clarifying and simplifying: shadows are clean, the white planes of the background subtle differentiated. Neither is there any of the traditional excess of the genre, no luxuriating in the sensuality of an object embodied in paint. Rüthi’s still lives are not full-blow, bellicose, baroque, but thinned down, frail, etiolated. His brush at times merely strokes the surface, barely covering the cheap wooden ground. The fixing of the objects in paint is as light and provisional as their temporary placement on the shelf (itself a poor relation of the expansive table of still life tradition). They are painted quickly - yet filled with a sense of slowness. The original work of art, stilled through its photographic reproduction, is stilled once more through Rüthi’s brushstrokes. Like ghosts, these images bear a physical resemblance to their originals, while assuming their own ineffable form. Rüthi, uninterested in realism, avoids a literal duplication of the artwork. Instead, like all truly creative translators, he touches the original lightly, creating a sequence of afterlives rather then reproductions.

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