Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present Jerónimo Rüedi’s solo exhibition Systems, his third in the combined spaces of the gallery. This show gathers works created in the last year purposely for this presentation.
Rüedi’s practice is deeply involved with the materiality of painting, to the extent that he has created his own formulas for primer and pigments. He then applies the paint with airbrushes, creating many layers with different levels of transparency, which sometimes give a feeling of some elements being encapsulated. His use of the instrument varies from one area of the canvas to another, some covering large sections uniformly, in others giving a spraying effect, while some segments evince a very careful, yet lenient control of the airbrush. With the latter, he produces small gestures, almost drawings, that operate in tension between abstraction, figuration, and written signs that one cannot fully understand —almost as if they were a pictorial system of writing, a code the content of which one ignores but can aim to elucidate.
Along with the emphasis on materiality, Rüedi is also profoundly concerned with systems of meaning, whether these are visual, linguistic, conceptual, or otherwise. His work examines the moment when a process of signification falters, due to continuous ambiguity or because the system of communication becomes insufficient. Hence, his layering is also conceptual: every single gesture in his work is both part of a visual composition and a suggestion of veiled meaning.
In Rüedi’s work, there are several systems at play, and therefore spheres in which one can read the works: systems of signs, of thought, of information, biological, of the nervous system, planetary, and of the universe as a closed—yet always moving—system.
Jerónimo Rüedi has been based in Mexico City since 2015. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina in 1981 and studied in Escola Massana, in Barcelona, Spain. Before moving to Mexico City he lived in Berlin, Germany. In recent years, Rüedi has been a resident artist at Casa Wabi (2023), taken part in the XVIII Painting Biennial at Museo Tamayo (2019), been a resident artist of the Museo Experimental El Eco (2016), and produced stage scenery for the play "Jazz Palabra" by Juan José Gurrola (LA Theater Center, Los Angeles, California, 2015/ Casa del Lago, Mexico City, 2014). His work has been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2023), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2019), the Museo Tamayo (2019), and in a project organized by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City, as part of its iconic, encyclopedic survey "Defying Stability" (2014). He recently published two books, "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (2020, Gato Negro Ediciones) and "The Stuff dreams are made of" (2017, ed. Macolen). As a result of his growing interest in the relationship between image and language, both volumes complement and shed new light on his pictorial work. A new, through publication on his work is being prepared for 2024. He is one of the co-founders of Aeromoto, the public library for the contemporary art and culture in Mexico City.
