Rudolf Stingel

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

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Rudolf Stingel's grandly-scaled work on canvas, Untitled (2013), rests between complete abstraction and fragmented representation. An uninterrupted golden-toned section fills most of the canvas's expanse, while the lower right hand side reveals an underlying image, depicted in a simple monochromatic scale. A repeating pattern in this small section recedes into a background which indicates some sort of architectural environment. The edge between solid color and this hard-to-define image is irregular, as well, giving the overall impression that the image behind was being hastily negated by broad sweeps of color.

An Italian-born artist living in New York, Stingel is an innovative voice in the world of contemporary painting. His 2013 Untitled work is linked to many of the artist's other works of the past decades. Beginning his career as a painter, and staking a claim in the territory of the monochromatic painting in the 1980s, Stingel has since begun incorporating other approaches and media as well, including installation, sculpture, and interaction. Stingel began interrogating not just the picture plane, but also its surrounding environment with his sculptural series of cast resin radiators in the 1990s, and he has carried this interest in architectural space over into his transformative installation works. In his 1991 installation at Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Stingel filled white cube spaces with a brightly-colored monochromatic carpet that lined the entire gallery, throwing off the perception of the space as the color bounced off of white walls. In other cases, Stingel has used printed carpet, monochrome, or with the motif of an ancient rug in black/white or colors to upholster not only the floor, but also the walls, covering every surface with imposing burgundies, intricate flourishes, and traditionally-inspired patterns. In several other installations made in the early 2000s, Stingel used reflective metallics to cover the walls, inviting visitors to leave their own marks on the easily-impressible surfaces.

Another of Stingel's installations made in 2004 and presented in the Grand Central Terminal in New York used a multi-colored floral carpet to transform the iconic Vanderbilt Hall. The usually smooth, gleaming surfaces of the Terminal's floors were concealed by this repeating pattern in pinks, greens, blues, and mauves, casting the space with an entirely different feel. Leveraging pattern and texture, this simple act made the grand hall into something more intimate, and domestic to uncanny effect. Stingel's 2013 oil and enamel on canvas abstraction takes this earlier work as a point of departure: the bits of image revealed where the rich tone recedes reproduce this vibrating pattern of the carpet in a muted monochrome.

Stingel's work plays with optical illusion, the use and disruption of monochromatic surfaces, and architecture. Both his earlier monochromatic canvases and this Untitled work—in which the monochrome begins to erode—may recall Kazimir Malevich's canvas that started it all, the Suprematist Composition: White on White of 1918. One of the very first monochromatic compositions, Malevich's skewed white square set within a warmer white plane dispensed with pictorial space and took abstraction to a new level of rigor. Like all of the monochromatic paintings to come after, Stingel's Untitled begins, perhaps, with a consideration and partial refusal of this history initiated by Malevich.

Stingel's work also echoes op art, like that made by pioneering British artist Bridget Riley. Using repeating patterns to emphasize spatial orientation (and at time, disorientation), Stingel evokes Riley's sense of graphic movement and visual distortion. Riley's Fall, from 1963, uses simple alternating black and white lines, which wave across the surface of the work. Riley's lines imply movement, and contrive a sense of receding space although the piece remains entirely abstract. Stingel's patterned carpet, which is rendered as mere texture in Untitled, ebbs away from us in a similar way, a sense of agitation overriding the stasis of the image. The tension between representation and negation through abstraction, and the reference to one of his most well-known works make Untitled an interesting example of Stingel's fixation with space, pattern, and texture.