Michael Raedecker's flowers have a subtle quality of unparalleled grace captured in a glow of intellectual order and mathematical refinement. He presents a canvas and a half as one: a classical and elegant subject doubled, like gliding seamlessly from one film still to the next. The heavily rendered bouquet almost acts as a propellant weight. Stitched delicately along the background, an attenuate tangle of lines provides a further sense of motion. Reminiscent of sheet music, Michael Raedecker presents a painting with the enveloping ambience of a film complete with soundtrack. BIOGRAPHY 1963 Born in Amsterdam, Holland Currently lives in and works in London 1985-1990 BA Fashion Design, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam 1993-1994 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam 1996-1997 MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London Michael Raedecker is a big fan of film, especially anything with a grandiose American landscape, the untamed freedom of the west. In beam he paints a lonely cabin in the woods - but this is no ordinary night scene: it's almost like the painting has been solarised. A strange halo glow radiates from the trees, the crackling surface of the ground flickers between positive and negative light like an unnatural frost effect. There are shadows everywhere, distinctly pronounced in a conscious mirroring of the image: a double painting in one. This is a scene which is impossible in nature but completely commonplace in Michael Raedecker's imagination and in spaghetti westerns. Raedecker got the idea from night scenes in old cowboy flicks, which were shot in the daytime with a filter over the lens.Michael Raedecker's cottage sits in a poured environment: the dappled green background made up of layers of caked paint. He obliterates the top half of the canvas as sky: the thick white puddle the densest part of the painting, threatening to consume the scene with its illusionary weight.
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