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Produced by Ibid. London, Lisa Reuben and Kenny Schachter.

Click here to see the catalog for the exhibition



Dirty Pretty Things

Like Dickens’ descriptions of London fog in Bleak House, Alex Ruthner spins a fragmented narrative that plays out on a polluted field: paint becomes yellow, brown, grey, and fleshy toned muck. His paintings are not unrelievedly bleak, however; in amongst the grime are winks of paradise: fields of poppies, stands of trees. The paint in these works is splattered, stained and slathered with pictorial fragments from rural and urban landscapes along with shards of historical references from Picasso to Alex Katz.

Ruthner studied under Albert Oehlen at the Dusseldorf Academy and Daniel Richter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and in some ways his work evinces a merging of these two teachers: Oehlen the post-mod, cut-and-paste poster boy, equal parts painter and digital collagist and Richter, the painterly fantasist spinning idiosyncratic, convoluted tales. Ruthner has twisted their lessons into something distinctly his own.

Just six months ago, Ruthner had his first solo exhibition in the UK, at London’s Ibid gallery. Since then, his restless talent has led him in different directions. A Ruthner canvas is a poetic wreck, an explosion of abstraction, figuration and the barest, reductive making of marks. These are risky works that revel in process and material: he courts failure, and achieves success.

These paintings are not definitive statements. They are open-ended questionings and provocations initiating conversations about a fragmented world that mirrors our media-saturated short-attention-spanned lifestyles. Ruthner serves up his aesthetics with a thick helping of politics, taking the temperature of society, often handing us an unpleasant report.

There is as much subtraction as addition, as much synthesis as analysis. Each work is like an environmentally destructive act—fracking and strip mining come to mind—gnawing into the surface, only to build it back up. The mix of materials lends these paintings an olfactory dimension: you can smell Ruthner’s devotion to the act of painting, and sometimes that odor is putrid.

In all this dejected mayhem, there is a generosity in Ruthner’s work. He demystifies the act of painting by using the canvas itself as a palette, creating pictures within pictures. Pigment residues, stains, smudges and traces become integral to his compositions while lending insight into their very making. In front of this new body of work, we are all voyeurs, peeping at a methodology that brings to mind the Bruce Nauman’s early videos about the act of drawing, the heavy metal splatters of early Richard Serra works and post-industrial (and, in Ruthner’s hands, post-internet) entropy of Robert Smithson.

Occasionally, horizontal slats appear in the works that reference fashion as well as Venetian blinds—the most economical way to let light (and life) in and keep it out by the mere yank of a cord. Ruthner has said that he imitates haute-couture fabrics, but favors the soiled-looking variety. If his paintings recall any number of glamorous runways, they are also the pictorial equivalent of the squalor of a dirty dorm room. Per Wilde, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Sometimes Ruthner incorporates bits and pieces of distorted cartoon imagery, like a drugged-looking Mickey Mouse, cute but sinister references that draw the viewer in even as they unnerve him. Anxiety lurks just beneath the surface of these paintings. Like certain ill-advised affairs, they are sweet in the moment, but leave an aftertaste of frustration that makes them difficult to shake.

When the new works arrived for installation, I noticed lipstick kisses strewn across the surface of a painting. Marks too strong not to register on the PDF file I’d been sent, they had clearly been administered after the works had been photographed. These ex post facto smooches—made, one assumes, by lips not belonging to Alex—are indicative of an artist in a state of constant flux and progress where even completed works (documented and sent on) are fluid up until the moment the transport van arrives to whisk them away.

Ruthner has swallowed whole a group of highly touted, insouciant artists who have been embraced by market-minded art flippers for their slight, messy interventions on canvas; painters who, it appears, never learned to paint. His practice marks a convergence of painterly conceptualism with that bogeyman of today’s instant gratification, turbo-charged buying and selling: traditional skill. Ruthner himself has said he is not a “supermarket artist” making product for a greedy market in search of the next thing, but his work also does the talking for him: with some of these paintings bordering on downright tough, he should hardly be concerned about being confused with the commercially-minded.

Ruthner’s is a tightly wound world characterized by dejection and outright despondency—but it is shot through with glimpses of hope and happiness. His paintings are not transcendent; they don't transport you anywhere, but instead anchor you to material reality, and this they do with grit, finesse and great beauty. Ruthner is at once a storyteller and a portraitist. His portrait is an abstract, collective one, of youth culture seen both in the present and through the lens of history. The story he tells is both classical and contemporary; it looks both forward and back.

Kenny Schachter, London 2014

For press enquiries or further information please contact:

Kenny Schachter at k@roveprojects.com
Ibid. London at info@ibidprojects.com

www.ibidprojects.com