Chrissie Iles: 'the parameters of painting and architecture are turned inside out. The traditional qualities of painting... pictorialism, flatness, illusion, composition, and autonomy... become corrupted by a new symbolic framework, in which painting metamorphoses.' (Chrissie Iles, ‘Surface Tension’, in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Rudolf Stingel, 2007, p. 23)
Rudolf Stingel’s fascinating Untitled asserts itself as one of the latest examples of the artist’s eagerly sought-after series of carpet works and a shimmering exploration of space, pattern and texture. Almost immediately, one is immersed into the unpredictable and uncertain surface of the canvas, as delicate ornamentation melts into geometrically-guided repetition. Swirling imprints and lively vines dominate the ornate textile relief, pierced by small and unique deviations, leaving room for a sense of painterly accident. These deviations provide an indelible trace of their human craftsmanship. Amidst the brilliance of the magenta hue and iridescent silver, imprints of medallions and floral motifs emerge, evoking the Baroque tapestries that inspired Stingel. The intricate craftsmanship associated with both the Baroque and Rococo is something Stingel personally experienced and even undertook growing up in the Italian Tyrol and Vienna, where he attended a high school that provided training in Baroque decorative church wood carving. The materiality of such work left a deep impression on the young artist, conferring upon him a deep appreciation for the richness of decoration and the synthesis of both pictorial and architectural space.
There is a certain form of decadence in this work, with its decorative opulence, that serves as a reminder of a bygone world. At first, it seems we are no longer restrained by contemporary functionalism and minimalism, as the artist allows superfluous ornamentation to triumph once again. The re-purposing of these works, a carpet inverted from floor to ceiling, reinforces this idea of decorative excess. Yet as always with Stingel’s work, a contradicting duality exists. Opposing the sheer visual luxury of the canvas is the very method within which it was produced: the stencil. By applying paint through a stencil, Stingel is participating in the serialisation and mechanized modes of creation that superseded the work of the multiple skilled artisans who used to produce such lavish Baroque and Rococo designs. The semi-automatic methods used to create this work engender a readymade-esque sense of repeatability in it, which is juxtaposed against the craftsmanship of the original damask pattern Stingel appropriated for the piece. These varying factors conflate to produce a work that is at once both democratic and decadent, an ode to the artistic and the industrial.
As Roberta Smith writes, 'For nearly twenty years Rudolf Stingel has made work that seduces the eye whilst also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom.' Stingel has experimented with the medium of carpets for much of his career, covering surfaces in the Palazzo Grassi, Grand Central Terminal and Whitney Museum of American art with uniquely textured fabrics. His carpets are a testament to their uses in both architecture and design, often being the only part of a space where visitors can tangibly interact. From silver celotex walls where viewers are invited to make their own mark on the surface to expanses of shag carpets that merge the surface and materiality of paint into one fused object, these installations are part of an ongoing examination into the pictorialisation of architectural features and their newly emerging plurality. By recontextualising the physical domain that a carpet usually inhabits, Stingel is forcing the viewer to question its significance in both literal and metaphorical space. Untitled is a continuation of these ideas, another means of dissolving the relationship between the painting, the architectural space of its exhibition and the expected parameters of painting as a whole.
