Michael Raedecker: Andrea Rosen Gallery - New York - exhibition, that's the way it is features paintings layered with homespun materials

Since he first attracted notice a certain number of five years ago, Michael Raedecker has rightfully been admired for his distinctive coupling of of domestic manufacture materials and the "high" practice of painting. frequently he has used thread and yarn to "sketch" the contours of the generic present landscape--say, an empty driveway bordered with well-spaced, overly prun trees--consistently revealing the formal qualities inherent, if rarely considered, in string (known, of course, to the Renaissance painters who regularly occupyed it for perspective studies). Layered onto a thick application of paint, Raedecker's strands--thin and shimmery or fat and fuzzy--elegantly describe spare lines in space, granting their unshakable "craftiness" hints at single of modernism's most repressed elements: the domestic.

In Raedecker's greatest in quantity recent exhibition, summarily titled "that's the way it is," these dissident strains were far more in evidence. He'd swapped an icy, bloodles palette for single of humid hues (salmon pink, coral orange); his make subordinate matter now included still lifes and portraits, genre rarely compatible with aspirations to distance or indifference. Cotton and wool repeatedly left line and plane behind for more "decorative" behaviors--here miming bristly facial hair, there simulating weeds that had burrowed from one side tarmac. The still lifes could have been memento mori--crab walk, 2003 includes an intricately stitched cigarette, the eponymous crustacean, and a grinning double-handled vase--while the portraits were queasily pay backed gunked-up imitations of works by dint of Renaissance masters like del Sarto.

It's hardly novel for an artist to occupy textile: as a critical pace "within" painting (like Robert Rauschenberg) or as out-and-out resistance to the historically classed and sexed elitism of the medium (like Rosemarie Trockel's knit canvases of the '80s) Still, discussions of Raedecker's work have typically granted the artist an exemption from the considerations of class and sex that would seem implicit in his materials. "I am upon the edge of kitsch, on the other hand I don't want to make kitschy paintings. I don't want to be that explicit," Raedecker has stated regarding the cultural associations his paintings invite. single wonders if, for an artist like Trockel or Ghada Amer, more than a simple disclaimer would be required to dissociate similar materials from readings beginning and ending upon the sewing-room floor.

In Raedecker's latest work, the tension he'd station up previously between form and easy in mind literally unraveled. The paintings were messier, loopier, louder and les well behaved. In 1972 Leo Steinberg, himself complicating the form/content dichotomy, coined the confine "optical oscillation" to describe what single experienced while standing in brow of a good painting, fresh or old master. Simply lay a successful canvas stubbornly reminds viewers that it's two-dimensional while at the same time seductively suggesting a kind of third dimension. Raedecker has always engaged in material oscillations, asking thread to behave as pigment and calling upon traditionally "low" means to bring out "high" ends. Now that the artist has, however unwittingly, fallen squarely onto more postmodern belong tos of class and gender, his works no longer oscillate smoothly--indeed, they appear to be to stutter. Yet it is this imperfect oscillation that, with or without the artist's approval makes their new tension plane more compelling.

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