Thomas Ruff — Tableaux chinois
Thomas Ruff’s first gallery exhibition in Paris since 2006, Chinese paintings at the David Zwirner gallery continues to explore, without dogmatism, the strength of images and update this concept which guided his research of a possibility of their grammar.
Thomas Ruff — Tableaux chinois @ David Zwirner Gallery from January 14 to March 6, 2021. Learn more Figure of contemporary photography and icon of the Dusseldorf school having redefined the rules of an artistic production aiming to use various methods of reproduction to articulate a reflection around the image, Ruff presents a collection of new images that pursues its research as much as it raises contemporary political questions. From the power of representation to the representation of power, the journey very often goes back and forth and the twentieth century in which media propaganda was spread on an industrial scale continues to give the pulse of the geographic and social organization of our world. A generalized confusion that polarizes the ideas into competitive ideologies that Thomas Ruff, in his latest series, deconstructs by playing on the hiatuses inherent in any form of representation, relying here on technical points specific to the analog printing of images and disrupting the reading grid by making digital alterations.
Drawn from his collection of propaganda magazines _China, _ published in french between the late 1950s and the 1970s, Thomas Ruff collects images that he digitizes to overlay their clones whose halftone screen is converted into accumulation of pixels. The image thus become a digest of digital and analog techniques is finally reorganized by the photographer who isolates entire parts to create a new rendering, crippled by the technical marks of its manufacture.
Fundamental, the figure of Mao Zedong becomes the major model of an iconography which still catches the eye today. The peace of mind of the National Secretary, sometimes busy with writing, sometimes serene contemplative of a future towards which he seems to be leading us, is disjointed from the principle of reality which seems to flow under his feet. Beside him, in an immaculate sky, the planes seem to dance in parades where military machines and members of the army rub shoulders with the symbolic grace of dancers, the majesty of flowers whose contradictory charms install us in a deceptive tranquility. Squares of evanescent colors swarm around, replacing the redactions of the past to become a new weapon of invisibility of the present. Forms that blur with a certain grace, borrowing from the vocabulary of a minimal aesthetic to participate in an appeal of seduction that Thomas Ruff seems to play with, fomenting an attraction for a nostalgic imagination, a color chart “Vintage” which gives its complexity to the charm of the image.
The technique becomes, as usual with Thomas Ruff, a plastic tool which he uses like a brush to trace areas of indeterminacy in the image, counterpoints to the faithful reproduction of a reality reconstructed for a meaningful diffusion. Formerly marked by the message it synthesized, today it appears laden with staging artifices and arrangements whose reading seems renewed. Illegible elements here become masses, hazy areas seem to conceal mysteries which upset the reading. The images reintegrate their subjects into a pantheon that touches us directly and the intervention of Thomas Ruff offers a sensitive reinterpretation which, if it insists on their belonging to the past, prevents us from falling into the trap of an aesthetic idealization that would believe them to be definitely obsolete.
If he no longer carries out photographs himself, strictly speaking, his peregrinations within contemporary iconography and the act of reproduction, their passage under the light beam of the scanner become an other way of writing with light ; he brings the life of the image to a close by adding his double, an attempt to exhaust it through tautology which inevitably reveals its limits. They thus continue to sow in the present the seeds of a seduction that oscillates between the lightness and the topicality of its threat, as the cults of personalities organized by the powers themselves still flood the urban landscapes of many regions of the world. Because Thomas Ruff has never ceased to feed his work, since his youngest years, by an informed look on other mediums, which one evokes the influence of painting, sculpture or video in his work. At the same time, the gallery presents paintings of emblematic works which remain in the artist’s logic of erasure and discretion and, again, leave the interpretation open.
Beyond the method, it is indeed the confrontation with a unique and unprecedented series of the artist that makes an event through this exhibition, drawing the ambiguous reflection of the past in a new world crippled by health, economic and social issues where propaganda speeches regain their prevalence. Faced with new uses of ideology Thomas Ruff plunges us into a deep reflection imbued with a bitter lightness that seizes the images to unroll their significant load.
