Jerónimo Rüedi »Systems«

Rüedi’s practice is deeply involved with the materiality of painting, to the extent that he has created his own formulas for primer and pigments. He then applies the paint with airbrushes, creating many layers with different levels of transparency, which sometimes give a feeling of some elements being encapsulated. His use of the instrument varies from one area of the canvas to another, some covering large sections uniformly, in others giving a spraying effect, while some segments evince a very careful, yet lenient control of the airbrush. With the latter, he produces small gestures, almost drawings, that operate in a tension between abstraction, figuration, and written signs that one cannot fully understand—almost as if they were a pictorial system of writing, a code the content of which one ignores but can aim to elucidate.

Along with the emphasis on materiality, Rüedi is also profoundly concerned with systems of meaning, whether these are visual, linguistic, conceptual, or otherwise. His work examines the moment when a process of signification falters, due to continuous ambiguity or because the system of communication becomes insufficient. Hence, his layering is also conceptual: every single gesture in his work is both part of a visual composition and a suggestion of veiled meaning.

In Rüedi’s work, there are several systems at play, and therefore spheres in which one can read the works: systems of signs, of thought, of information, biological, of the nervous system, planetary, and of the universe as a closed—yet always moving—system.