Christoph Ruckhäberle

Christoph Ruckhaberle conceives Plakatwand with an intentional staginess. Rendered with the rigid artifice of theatrical backdrops, Ruckhaberle's billboard-scale canvas approaches painting as a vaudevillian construction: a clichéd scene consciously exposing its own formulaic aspirations. Mixing techniques between naïve stylisation and impassioned gesture, Plakatwand is tinged with both humour and pathos. Ruckhaberle pictures the artist/vagabond as a comitragic figure, an idealistic bohemian crippled beneath the proliferation of mass-produced imagery and commercial message. Christoph Ruckhaberle approaches this canvas as several paintings in one: independent territories of brick, sky, wall, figure, become compressed to a single claustrophobic plane. From this referential abstraction, Ruckhaberle poses his painting as a romantically fatalist yet classically spectacular production.

Christoph Ruckhaberle’s China executes the power of will over logic. Using painting as a tool of invention, Ruckhaberle’s scene defies reason in exchange for paradoxical intrigue. Furniture and tableware fly in violent chaos while retaining an effect of controlled calmness, their psychic energy resonating from the concentrated central figure. Ruckhaberle renders this image with unsettling impartiality; psychological torment becomes a problem of geometric design. Motion is frozen in compositional elegance, fragmented into oscillating squares and orbs. Neutralising his subject matter, Ruckhaberle creates a sense of magic through the complexity of construction, making the impossible accessible through discipline and volition of imagination.