Essay: Silvia Rudolf

War Series: Horizon, 2007

Oil pastel on canvas board

14 x 11 in.

$ 575

SILVIA RUDOLF

By Wim Roefs

2008

Silvia Rudolf sits on the fence between non-objectivity and a representational but abstracted approach to painting and drawing. In either case, she does a lot with little. Her work has a high level of economy in terms of materials, lines, marks, pallet and the like. With sure, lively but raw lines and marks, a few colors and a good bit of negative space, she creates exciting, often sparse compositions that are at once expressive and understated.

“Mostly I start working with a line, a movement, a dot,” Rudolf says. “Or one special color – orange maybe. I work this way both on paper and canvas. Sometimes, I have a certain idea, a theme, inspired by poetry, music or by a photograph. Then I try to find an adequate expression, work around it and with it, often making a series to explore a subject more deeply.”

Rudolf’s series include Medea, five small oil paintings interpreting and visualizing the Greek myth. Several series have taken late-19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as their theme. One of them, Friedrich Nietzsche: Seelenlandschaften (Landscapes Of The Soul) of 2000, consists of nine, 8” x 8”, seemingly non-objective panels in grays and grayish blues, dirty whites and carbon marks that develop a certain rhythm and intensity as the series progresses. Another, Nietzsche – Ein Mensch (A Human Being) consists of four, 8” x 8” panels, each depicting a flesh-toned, perhaps agonizing figure against a split background of browns and pinkish whites.

Nietzsche – Ein Mensch is in the current exhibition, as are 11 panels from Rudolf’s War series, including the triptych War I, II and III. With a pallet of only grays, orange-reds and different degrees of dirty whites, Rudolf uses to great effect a combination of drawing and painting. By placing vigorous, grayish lines and marks on top, above or below solid orange-red fields of different heights but flush left-to-right, therefore splitting the canvas horizontally, the work has at once a stark post-Minimalist and Abstract-Expressionist feel. 

The two works from her Bodies series in the current show are burst of energy in mostly the same pallet as the War series, but without the stark division of the plane, the minimalism is limited to the abundance of negative space surrounding the action. In her Walking Figures series, Rudolf uses a solid rectangle to set off the quickly sketched figures rather than to split the field.

“Sometimes I work the same image over and over,” Rudolf says. “ I’ll add another layer, take away one and leave it for days, weeks. In a given moment I try to ‘discover’ what’s inside the work and ‘carve’ it out.

But it’s all about ‘visualizing,’ making visible my way of seeing things.”