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RUDOLF STINGEL, Untitled, 2004

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Untitled, 2004. Oil and enamel on canvas. 240 × 194 cm (94 1/2 × 76 3/8 in). Signed and dated ‘Stingel 2004’ on the reverse.
‡♠

PROVENANCE Sadie Coles HQ, London
Rudolf Stingel’s wallpaper paintings are, on first appearance, pure aesthetic pleasure. Luxurious gold and baroque elegance oozes from the pattern, drawing us in with arresting awe. A gilded artifice, the canvas is like a window to a bygone era of decadence: at once a static wall, on second look a dynamic surface with myriad reflections and inflections. Through the appropriation of an original damask pattern, gold enamel has been applied to the monochrome canvas. Its subsequent removal has left its deep residue and varying trace upon the surface. What might once have been a Minimalist monochrome painting has been transformed into a layered baroque composition with all the imperfections brought about by chance. Stingel toys with our expectations of not only ‘painting’ and ‘paint’ but also of the role of the ‘painter’ as well – the artist maintains his autonomy in the process of creation. In Stingel’s 2007 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the artist created a complete environment out of a glowing, all-encompassing foil-lined atrium. Yet what appeared to be a display of elite grandeur and luxury, was quickly reversed as visitors touched and scratched the walls, so collaborating in the work’s process. Influenced by his Italian roots and Arte Povera, Stingel’s work is dedicated to the dislocation of our expectations of painting. Stingel’s wallpaper paintings remain at once democratic and decadent – a ready-made pattern transformed into high art. Untitled, 2004, recalls Yves Klein’s MG 20, in which Klein too adds dynamism to the layers and texture of the gold on the canvas in the mottled shadows and inflections. Covering their canvases entirely, Klein and Stingel create alchemical surfaces. Yet Stingel’s work goes a step further in its incorporation of figuration. Indeed, Francesco Bonami identifies a link between Gerhard Richter’s photorealist works and Abstraktes Bilds and Stingel’s practice: where Richter collapses the gap between figuration and abstraction, Stingel develops this in the perfect conjunction of both. Stingel’s wallpaper paintings are the site of layers of art history’s deepest dialogues. In the way they interact with a presumed history of painting, the surrounding architecture and the very surface on which the artist works, these paintings become, in the words of one critic, “no longer extensions or accumulations on the wall; rather they are artificial slivers of time existing somewhere outside of the viewers’ own” (Gary Murayari, ‘Rudolf Stingel: Moving Pictures’, Flash Art, no. 262, October 2008). The present work is an astonishing example of Stingel’s ability and willingness to engage with today’s concerns with painting through the unexpected medium of beauty.

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