Seductive and lustrous in its gilded radiance, Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled from 2013 is an effulgent, utterly captivating example of the artist’s highly celebrated series of Carpet paintings. Manifesting a spectral trace of an elegant Oriental rug, the present work embraces the opulence and grandeur of gold, a metallic hue used extensively by the artist in his wide-ranging oeuvre that centers on the process of creation and the interrogation of painting as an expressive medium. With a deadpan insistence on the materiality of the glistening gold surface, Stingel reformulates the underlying instability of Baroque richesse to create a profound new space between indulgence and restraint. In Untitled, the image of the carpet is repeated and fragmented across the canvas, evoking the mechanical process of screening and foregrounding the commercial seriality that is central to Stingel’s stance on the automation and mechanization of ornamentation and beauty. Throughout his career, Stingel has challenged the role and obligation of painting in contemporary art, cultivating an assiduously theoretical body of work that calls into question the authorial status of the artist and the aesthetic function of painting as a medium. At once lavishly decadent yet ostensibly built through industrialized processes, the present work’s nuanced references to the decorative styles of the Italian Baroque and French Rococo deftly contribute to Stingel’s overarching concerns regarding the fusion of pictorial and architectural space. Untitled elegantly crystallizes these artistic investigations in a masterfully executed and luminous monumental canvas, embracing the enigmatic qualities of desire while pulling back the curtain to expose the very process of its own manufacture.

Stingel has long been fascinated by the conceptual and painterly portent of carpet. It first appeared in his oeuvre in the form of a bright orange rug installed on the floor in his show at the Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York, in 1991, and on the wall in the 1993 Venice Biennale as part of the Aperto ’93 exhibit. Since then this theoretical engagement has developed into all-consuming installations in the Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Station in 2004 and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2010, for which he blanketed the entire floor of these locations in highly patterned carpet. In alignment with Stingel’s approach to painting (works are frequently walked upon without hesitation), these installations encouraged the viewer to touch and trample over their surfaces, thus initiating an element of destructive participation that bears the footprint of time’s passage. Most recently, Stingel’s critically lauded 2013 retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice imparted the very apogee of this intriguing dialogue, consuming the floor, wall, and ceiling of the palazzo’s grand rooms with an image of a threadbare Persian rug printed onto an enormous roll of carpet. Untitled, executed in the same year as this landmark exhibition, bares the legacy of these colossal conceptual investigations in its commanding and sumptuous facture.

The artist's impressive career has been distinguished by a constant challenge of traditional genres of art—a project beautifully underscored by Untitled. Juxtaposing high art with commercial production, painting with craftwork, the artist and the manufacturer, Stingel negotiates the tenuous relationships between distinct media. Gary Carrion-Murayari writes: “His work demonstrates an acute awareness of the aspirations, failures and challenges to Modernist painting, while at the same time expressing a sincere belief in painting itself, focusing on formal characteristics including color, gesture, composition, and, most importantly, surface.” (Gary Carrion-Murayari, “Untitled,” in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (and traveling), Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 111) Consistent with the overarching themes in Stingel’s art, the present work balances this complex relationship between intricate draftsmanship and a mechanized process that undermines the status of the artist, moving beyond mere representation towards the value of process. By innovatively engaging with these questions in Untitled, Stingel simultaneously demystifies and intensifies the allure enshrouding his art. An amalgamation of ornamentation and geometrically guided repetition, Untitled is a resplendent testimony to the artist’s investigation into the definition of painting.