We welcome Virginia Wesleyan University’s John Rudel to the gallery. His exhibition with Temme Barkin Leeds opens in the fall of 2020. Look for new material on Rudel and Barkin Leeds in the upcoming year. Both artists were featured in our booth at Current Art Fair this past fall.
John Rudel
Artist's Statement:
A recent preoccupation with Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook has inspired a new direction for my artwork. An understanding of Klee's trichotomy of "active," "medial," and "passive" elements of the painting process have influenced me to jettison the use of photographic imagery that dominated prior work. These new paintings consist of illusions of light and space that come into focus, and then get interrupted by clusters of flat patterns and polychromatic dots. Viewers are invited to a sublime and shifting experience of vision when encountering these glowing and vibrating compositions. These works swell and flatten as one's focus changes between particular aspects of these paintings that simultaneously compliment and compete with each other.
Previous series have engaged the rapidity of digital imaging technology intermingled with the slow and intuitive practice of traditional painting/drawing as a means of reflecting the alternating mindsets required of an individual navigating the contemporary world.
All of my images evolve in the studio with lots of reflection, and most often a series of changes that involves layering elements. I like to work with images and motifs that escape duration and confound the passage of time. I want to hold a viewer’s interest with tools such as spectacle or detail. I'm often drawn to recognizable images because they have the power to engage perception in a familiar way, but I use also surface texture and competing hyper decorative patterns in my work to inspire alternative types of visual engagement.
My work is dominated by visual competition. Understanding comes to me as a matrix of comparisons. My work is constructed in the same way. “Meta-modernism” is a contemporary social theory that suggests individuals are always in oscillation between modes of understanding. Additionally, contemporary neurosciences suggest that the human brain is highly vulcanized, with our reasoning and decisions resultant from an ongoing internal "argument." My image aggregations and competing hyper-decorative colors serve to celebrate a complex unity of vision, while questioning the solidity particular perceptions.
Bio:
John Rudel has exhibited his work across the country in venues including the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), the University of Miami Art Museum (Oxford, OH), the Lauren Rodgers Museum (Laurel, MS), the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (Brooklyn, NY), and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA). Rudel’s drawings were given the “Award of Distinction in Drawing” at the 2007 Virginia Artists Juried Exhibition at the Charles Taylor Arts Center in Hampton VA, and his Paintings were selected by Lisa Dennison, Director of the Guggenheim NY as 1 of 20 winners of the 2002 MFA National Competition in New American Paintings Magazine. In 2004 Rudel was awarded a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship. In addition to 8 solo exhibitions in the last ten years, Rudel has been commissioned three times by the Norfolk Public Art Commission and also has a large mural featured in the NEON Arts District in Norfolk. He is Professor of Art at Virginia Wesleyan University where he also serves as Curator of Exhibitions for the Neil Britton Art Gallery. Rudel was awarded a Batten Professorship in 2014 in recognition of excellence in teaching, scholarship, community contributions, and passion for inspiring excellence in others.
