Brian Rutenberg: Reeds Rise

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For more than 45 years, Brian Rutenberg’s response to the natural world has melded together the seen and the imagined through masterful and unexpected combinations of color and generously applied oil paint. Rutenberg’s paintings are both conspicuous and instantly recognizable: high-keyed, fauvist-inflected color applied to the canvas with a rich physicality and vigorous texture. Rutenberg has a penchant for unexpected juxtapositions of intrepid color, layering patches of intense sapphire blue beneath strokes of pink taffy, or regions of cantaloupish orange that emerge from environments of earthy brown. These vibrant and energetic groups of color assert themselves with an idiosyncratic muscularity that bursts forward from the surfaces of his canvases.

The title of this new exhibition references a poem by the 20th century American poet Samuel Menashe, “Reeds Rise from Water.” In a statement for the show, Rutenberg writes, “[This poem] embodies a marriage between nature and art, one hinting at the other…. in just a palmful of words.” In creating his art, Rutenberg extracts the structures and colors of landscape and reassembles them into a painterly universe all his own. While his work is populated with references to natural forms—trees, horizon, bodies of water, Rutenberg has moved further and further away from depicting the literal in order to explore what he calls “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking.” His paintings reflect a desire to immerse his viewers not in the universe of the landscape, but in the universe of painting—which, to Rutenberg, has always manifested an artist’s state of wonder.

Rutenberg has long been inspired by eighteenth century Rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose late work contained the revelation that an artist must bend the laws of nature in order to fit the laws of art. The nineteen canvases and four works on paper included in this exhibition attest to Brian Rutenberg’s inimitable, refreshing take on landscape painting for which he has gained a national reputation.