Exhibition: Jerónimo Rüedi 2025

Jerónimo Ruëdi, Airady Aftrmah, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ × 66 ⅞ in. (200× 170 cm)

In Preaesns, Jerónimo Rüedi’s first solo exhibition in the US, a suite of new paintings portray the unquiet vectors and orbital delays through which the mind can make a whole universe out of however little it sees. Vast expanses punctuate clusters of quickly rendered marks, made by hand and airbrush, that warp any clear-cut distinction between text and image, ligament and limb. In this limbo, they shape the teetering way that, in desiring meaning, relations between space and sight are clairvoyantly received. The titles of the works themselves attest as much, frying the logic of sense-making with recombination, resemblance, and playful anti-diction, to limn the multilingual world in which Rüedi, who lives between Mexico City and Berlin, paints: Aulcinnation gets close to the word for ‘hallucination’ in both English and Spanish, but is neither; Siegtemas might read as specifically as ‘victory theme’ in German or as generically as syntagma, the linguistic principle from the Greek, meaning ‘phrase,’ that the artist’s contraction almost obliterates.

Rüedi has long explored how viewers might be invited into his paintings, rather than confronted by their supposed exterior. Three of the works on display—Whgos Theroy, Oirgn 01, and Ausnecia—use encaustic technique, which involves encasing his canvases of aluminum and wood with a mixture of beeswax, resin, dry mineral pigment, and paint that Rüedi manufactures in his studio, along with the tools he uses to apply them. Lacy scribbles spread into curls or corners and glow like neon light against wide, empty ground, that, on close inspection, is revealed to be a dense, molten build-up it would be a mistake to call a surface. The result is a meticulous inversion of painting’s material properties and the comfy, clumsy vocabularies with which we want to describe what we see in them: the flatness of surface slacks concave and perforates; the speed of a light mark doubles as depth; empty space becomes a solicitation, as by a pool or a portal.

In the past, Rüedi has described his paintings as portraits of the time and space in which they are made. But these new paintings, many of which loom larger than human-size, are also portraits of our absorptive encounter with them. They insist on their own presence, and suggest a mutually constitutive relationship between the world and the tools, like science, or art, or language, we use to know it. The same thing happens in life. Try, for instance, using an extremely powerful device to clarify the hurtling movement of the night sky. An entire galaxy might crisply appear before you. What you are looking at, you see, is a smudge.

—Shiv Kotecha