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Lot Essay
Michael Raedecker studied fashion as an undergraduate and his understanding of the potential of thread and the techniques of sewing have underpinned the evolution of his distinctive painting style, where painting and thread are combined to form images in which opposing characteristics play off one another to maximum aesthetic effect and the boundary between reality and illusion disappears.
The panoramic desert-like landscape of Untitled 1999, is dream-like, the thread tracing forms of tree tops, a lake, and stones, creating a disconcerting aerial perspective and apparently skewed dimensions. The warped inner logic of a hallucinatory experience is invoked here, where focus on detail becomes hypnotic and microscopic, - in a manner which is both playful and tinged with the surreal.
With a delicacy reminiscent of Japanese scroll painting, Raedecker plays with our conventional expectations of how a painting should behave. Light sources are ambiguous - here the entire surface is apparently bleached with the hot midday sun - and all life is still in this other-worldly climate - Raedecker nods to his own country's painting tradition in the detail of the stones and apparent herds of cattle flocking to and from the water supply.
Raedecker's is a precise art - he does not luxuriate in the myriad sensory delights of the physical substance of paint nor does he indulge in its many applications - yet with the most minimal means - simple plain coloured thread, he conjurs up voluptuous forms that might be clues to a pictorial narrative, or might lead us entirely into an abstract reading of the work. Such is his compulsive skill and lightness of touch, his work demands the quiet attention of every viewer.
The panoramic desert-like landscape of Untitled 1999, is dream-like, the thread tracing forms of tree tops, a lake, and stones, creating a disconcerting aerial perspective and apparently skewed dimensions. The warped inner logic of a hallucinatory experience is invoked here, where focus on detail becomes hypnotic and microscopic, - in a manner which is both playful and tinged with the surreal.
With a delicacy reminiscent of Japanese scroll painting, Raedecker plays with our conventional expectations of how a painting should behave. Light sources are ambiguous - here the entire surface is apparently bleached with the hot midday sun - and all life is still in this other-worldly climate - Raedecker nods to his own country's painting tradition in the detail of the stones and apparent herds of cattle flocking to and from the water supply.
Raedecker's is a precise art - he does not luxuriate in the myriad sensory delights of the physical substance of paint nor does he indulge in its many applications - yet with the most minimal means - simple plain coloured thread, he conjurs up voluptuous forms that might be clues to a pictorial narrative, or might lead us entirely into an abstract reading of the work. Such is his compulsive skill and lightness of touch, his work demands the quiet attention of every viewer.