|
Nudes
Since 1999
Since his time at the Dusseldorf Art Academy Ruff has been fascinated
by the work of Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter
had developed a style of painting that used photographs as a starting
point. He used his own photographs or images cut from magazines
and newspapers and reproduced them through a time-consuming process
of painting, commenting on the difference between the photographic
image and the painted image.
Like many artists before him Richter was fascinated
by the human form and produced very beautiful, often blurred images
of female nudes, some of which are quite explicit. Ruff, having
studied Richter’s work, began to investigate the nude as a
genre. He became fascinated by the proliferation of pornographic
images available on the internet, which are usually very low resolution
(only 72 pixels, or dots of colour, per inch). Taking these low-resolution
images Ruff removed extraneous details, altered the tone, contrast
and colour and produced them on a much larger scale, creating a
refined but very blurred image.
Some of these images are explicit, but through his
manipulation of the material Ruff softens the subject matter. He
turns the conventional into something lavish while at the same time
the sense of detachment, apparent in most of his work, is amplified.
With the nudes, Ruff substitutes something
celebratory for suspicion and anger; he takes on a genre everyone
is an expert on but few artists have employed without running into
trouble... these pictures are analytic... objective, but they're
also sweetly, luxuriously visual. Up close... skin melts into tiny,
pointillist pixels, which then warp and moiré; colors shift,
pictorial space contorts. Sex slips into something ravishingly,
optically comfortable.
Jerry Saltz, ‘Ruff Trade’ in Village Voice,
30 May 2000
|
