Michael Raedecker gives us an unsettling look at spaces unreal and nearly forgotten. Traditional painting itself begins to unravel in Raedecker's process, which incorporates embroidery and stitching to create objects that are themselves literally distressed. Raedecker places his canvases on the floor and then suspends them from the ceiling to he can weave a needle and thread back and forth. He then lays the canvas flat and pours on paint, allowing it to congeal like drying blood around stitches.
His barren landscapes in muted tones are simple and ambiguous yet puzzling, like a memory that has become mutilated by imagination and unravelled by forgetfulness. His works are the ruins of memory, yet through their stitches and puncture wounds they convey a sense of survival. The works are wounded, weathered and aged; every fiber of their being is exhausted.
Raedecker's new collection contains skeletal architecture as well as haunting depictions of a chandelier and wedding cake. Yet again Raedecker humbly captures the fragile memories that fade and the beauty in the melancholy.
Raedecker's exhibition will show at Hauser & Wirth, North Gallery of Savile Row from February 23 to April 5.
