Lot 19: Beam, 2000

Beam, 2000
Acrylic and thread on canvas.  173 x 203 cm. (68 x 80 in).   Signed , titled and dated 'Michael Raedecker Beam 2000' on the overlap.

 London, The Approach, ins and outs, 6 May – 18 June, 2000; London, The Saatchi Gallery, 26 January - 30 October, 2005; Leeds City Art Gallery, 25 January - 12 March, 2006; The Triumph of Painting; Leeds, Harewood House Trust, Locating Home, 3 April – 5 July, 2009

 Exhibition catalogue, The Triumph of Painting, London, 2005, p. 154 (illustrated); 100: The Work that Changed British Art, London, 2003, pp. 92-93 (illustrated)

 The Approach, London

‘It has rightly been said that Michael Raedecker's paintings are ‘unsettling': we do not readily comprehend what is actually happening in them nor do they offer us an ideal viewing distance from which we might feel that the image coalesces into an accessible whole. The paint, the various kinds of threads, and the other materials sometimes pasted and painted over, work at cross purposes. At the distance where, for example, the paint still yields an immaterial ‘image' and forms readable figures, the threads already break away from the whole and turn into ‘wool' and ‘hairs' that undermine the image. On closer examination, loose hairs and threads stuck into the paint, along with protruding lumps of paint, evoke miniature landscapes, which then again approximate the complete image first seen in the painting, and so on. The embroidery and plaiting that Raedecker uses to imitate painterly effects never blend into the image evenly. The painting is never consistently ‘image' and the image never dissolves completely into paint. The image actually stays ‘messy' at all times; Raedecker's technique always generates the appearance of sloppy patchwork. The painter in this case is not a conjuror and not a magician, but a craftsman and a bricoleur.' (B. Verschaffel, Dirty Pictures, Parkett, Zurich, No. 65, 2002, p. 98)