MICHAEL RAEDECKER

A Dutch artist who is currently living and working in London. Drawing upon the historical importance traditionally invested within painting, Raedecker presents a thoroughly contemporary approach to his chosen medium. Whilst traces of a Dutch mastery for still-life can be found within his works, Raedecker juxtaposes this graceful aesthetic with a more physical process of stitching, cutting and embroidery. Primarily working with a monochromatic palette, Raedecker’s focus on the melancholia of modern life – with paintings of despoiled architecture and empty spaces – are both unsettling and enigmatic. He influenced by expressionism.

HIS WORKS

INS AND OUTS

Ins and outs is a sublime dream home. Steely grey in the dead of night, manicured in the expansive landscape, trees in a straight line, boulders placed decoratively for maximum effect: it might be the retirement retreat of a Silicone Valley millionaire, the kind of person who would bother to have their trees pruned into perfect orbs, who’d insist that their sky be as delicate as a Japanese watercolour. Michael Raedecker’s paintings are always little seeds of gossip. Drawn to this house by the impossible intensity of the light - made up of countless tiny pink and yellow threads - the first instinct is that something suspicious is happening within.

DESTRUCTIVE SUPERSTITION

The Dutch have always been masters at still life. Michael Raedecker’s flowers have a subtle quality of unparalleled grace captured in a glow of intellectual order and mathematical refinement. He presents a canvas and a half as one: a classical and elegant subject doubled, like gliding seamlessly from one film still to the next. The heavily rendered bouquet almost acts as a propellant weight. Stitched delicately along the background, an attenuate tangle of lines provides a further sense of motion. Reminiscent of sheet music, Michael Raedecker presents a painting with the enveloping ambience of a film complete with soundtrack.

BEAM

Michael Raedecker is a big fan of film, especially anything with a grandiose American landscape, the untamed freedom of the west. In beam he paints a lonely cabin in the woods - but this is no ordinary night scene: it’s almost like the painting has been solarised. A strange halo glow radiates from the trees, the crackling surface of the ground flickers between positive and negative light like an unnatural frost effect. There are shadows everywhere, distinctly pronounced in a conscious mirroring of the image: a double painting in one. This is a scene which is impossible in nature but completely commonplace in Michael Raedecker’s imagination and in spaghetti westerns. Raedecker got the idea from night scenes in old cowboy flicks, which were shot in the daytime with a filter over the lens.

THE GATEWAY

Michael Raedecker paints his woodland getaway in the night air. Breaking down the composition to the barest colour-field essentials, he sketches in the details with delicate stitch work: thick wool standing in for tree bark, fine silk threads tracing the enmeshed patterns of the distant trees, the shimmering ripples in the stream. The effect is a captivating stillness, an atmosphere of too-quiet isolation, a setting for leisurely (or illicit) escape.

PROP

Both prop and occluded utilise the material of their media to push the boundaries of representation: the illusion of space, the believability of how a subject sits in a canvas. In prop, Michael Raedecker’s tree is firmly anchored to the ground by real string, as if the leaves, by being rendered in paint and not thread, might float in their aqueous form off the canvas.

My Thoughts

Its pretty interesting that he uses Thread in his paintings, i guess you could say its unique. So this has given me a little idea of what i can use in my works. So maybe in future i might try to use his technique as a reference in my works.