The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Gina Ruggeri exhibition brochure

Ruggeri

Gina Ruggeri: Immaterial Landscape June 27 – August 29, 2010 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Gina Ruggeri: Immaterial Landscape

Gina Ruggeri’s project for The Aldrich is conceived as a constellation of largescale paintings on Mylar, cut out and attached flush to the Museum’s walls. The works depict imaginary landscape fragments that merge seamlessly with the gallery’s surfaces, activating the space. Surrounding the viewer from floor to ceiling, the images are rendered with dramatic spatial intensity, and take into account the viewer’s physical viewpoint. Trompe l’oeil caverns seem to puncture or erode some walls, while voluminous plumes of smoke and drifting clouds emerge from others.

These visionary fragments of nature test the boundary between reality and artifice as they lure the viewer into their believable yet impossible illusions.

Ruggeri’s work oscillates between the material and the immaterial, the rational and the irrational. Much of the immaterial quality emerges from painting that with close inspection becomes a pattern of intimate marks, more like a drawing, making us lose our grasp of the overall appearance. Thus, the painterly, colorful, and massive forms dematerialize as the attention shifts to the calligraphic gesture. Hence Ruggeri’s work contains intermingled aesthetics: the dominant medium oscillates between painting and drawing. Contrasting linear drawing versus the painterly/ color, Rosalind Krauss explains: “Drawing is seen as a vehicle of conceptual experience, while color is the vehicle of sensuous immediacy.”1 Ruggeri’s work incorporates both and allows for a choreographed movement between them.

If “a drawing is potential energy,”2as John Hallmark states, we could consider that Ruggeri is trying to evaporate our gallery space in the vein of Gordon MattaClark’s architectural Splitting projects of the 1970s. Her work brings into the gallery space a sense of physical and visual instability and opens up unexpected views. Yet Ruggeri does not open up walls to show their structural studs; rather, she cuts them open to bring in otherworldly landscapes, idyllic environments that acknowledge the museum as a site of illusion. As the works move from form to formlessness, they question the illusionary space not only of the paintings/drawings themselves, but of the museum as well. They remind us that not everything is what it seems. Ultimately, her paintings/drawings are a catalyst for experiencing real and imagined environments, as she heightens our perceptual awareness through meticulously rendered works of impeccable technique.

1 Rosalind Krauss, “Architects’ Drawings/Artists’ Buildings,” Drawings: The Pluralist Decade, catalogue for the 39th Venice Biennale 1980 (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Chicago), p. 45.

2 John Hallmark, “Site Specific Work: Indoors and Outdoors,” Drawings: The Pluralist Decade, p. 39.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

Gina Ruggeri, Double Cavern, 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York

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