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Christoph Ruckhaberle’s leisurely scenes operate like dysfunctional stage plays. Cribbed from all the best bits of art history, he imbues his paintings with a contemporary newness of vivid patterns and design colours. His elaborate sets are backdrops of static energy against which his cast nonchalantly mingles: placid and bored, unaware of their own interaction with an expectant audience. This sense of waiting is the delight in Christoph Ruckhaberle’s work. Charmed by the pure casualness of it all, his paintings offer the possibility of getting lost in a moment, a luxuriating pause where visual harmony is appreciated as inert ideal.Christoph Ruckhaberle approaches figurative painting from a purely formalist standpoint. His elaborate configurations don’t strive to depict narrative, but rather offer perverse pleasure in the idiosyncrasy of their construction. Christoph Ruckhaberle approaches painting as a compositional jigsaw puzzle, each element an individually delineated shape filling a gap in the whole: L-shaped elbows and knees disjointedly connect to rectangular dresses and socks, geometric furnishings float without a sense of grounded order. Christoph Ruckhaberle’s avant gardist compositions break down into absurd abstractions: contorted bodies, silhouetted trees, tea pots and parasols become intriguing excuses to render complex systems of repetitive circles, squares and interlinking patterns. Christoph Ruckhaberle’s folksy style gives a casual air to his balanced formal tension, consciously understating his wry visual humour, and clever citation of Matisse and Beckmann. Christoph Ruckhaberle’s work instils a sense of isolation and detachment: his figures are frozen in self-contained realms of thought, their painterly existence derived solely for the pleasure of creating visual suspense. Through this precarious balance of psychological intimacy, and cool, stylised aesthetics, Christoph Ruckhaberle contrives a soothing comfort through which an underlying anxiety passes almost unnoticed. written by Patricia Ellis
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