Claus Friedrich Rudolph
The images portrayed by the artist appear as if taken right out of a fairytale. They strike as familiar and exotic at the same time. The nostalgic mood of the fin de siecle gleams through them, revealing the mundane savois vivre of the golden 20’s. Yet, these interpretations, which sometimes appear to be painted, converse the spirit of our times. They are staged down to the smallest detail giving a calculated impression to the contemplating viewer, without revealing the last specific context of the story. This way, they challenge the creative spectator who by actively reflecting, completes the work which the artist initiated.
The world, in which Claus Rudolph takes us with his artful scenes, is a world somewhere between reality and fiction, between the actual and the imaginative, between real life and a world of good appearances. It is a game of the expressiveness of aesthetics; scenes of people as fictitious characters in an audience centred mythological setting that completely swells up in their role of the rising conceited self.
The photographs speak out of the absurd, the decadence within, the fashionable and the romantic reach out and remind one of the pictures aesthetics from Federico Fellini movies. With their presumed snapshot style they conquer the meaning with the here and now and become archetypes in which life’s plans manifest themselves, which icon-like rise above themselves, becoming a narrative of their roots, in which the map of life is laid bare- life plans that hints of a short story without beginning or end, life plans that speak for themselves and touch us more than we anticipate at the moment of viewing. You will experience how the photos of Claus Rudolph penetrate your mind and how the images echo, today or tomorrow, within the activities of your memories. The recollection of these images are supported by the intensity of colours, by the sonorous rich contrast, through the large format and the monumental settings, which also work powerfully and compellingly through their perfectly choreographed scenes projecting their strength and radiating from the pictures, leaving a striking impression.
CLAUS RUDOLPH (STUTTGART – GERMANY)
This German photographer loves to create his images setting up a true film scene, normally tied to a taste and a cinematographic culture very close to Fellini and hence of contents and atmospheres typical of the tales told by the director from Rimini. At the center of the composition a beautiful girl seated on a swing, light as a feather she enters into the center of the scene, behind her a curtain of red velvet and a curtain of gentlemen in tails looking downwards turn on the footlights for her. Under the looks of desire of many men this material girl of other times handles the situation from her position up high imposes herself also hierarchically on the audience and so highlighting her role. It will be she who chooses whom to pass her time with and not the prey of some hungry hunter. Even though perched like a bird in a cage on the swing, it will be she to determine the game and to dictate its rules. And so the cage has become of gold and the jewels and the money the keys to crack that prison and free herself of the chains of a life of woman-object. The image brings us to the movie Le Moulin rouge of Baz Lutherman, but here the public is in front of her, not around her and in this position we are part of it, we enter into the scene to be able to observe closely, to join in all the curious looks that make her feel so much the heroine and satisfied with all the attention that she is the voluntary and calculated victim of.
Nori Zandomenego
Claus Rudolph: Taken out of wonderland
Definitely Fellini-like and circus-like at the same time, like the German Rudolph, who for his photocinematic works uses the divergent and discordant elements of theatrical prose and human urgency, the latter which is present at the call with all of its aesthetic-relational impositions/definitions that always remake themselves as something seen and/or desired. Perhaps, at times, dreamed, when we sleep and we expect those similar to us to do the same, leaving us free to imagine , to embody things and valences that we have intercepted in our lives and putting them away for safekeeping, inside a memory that is not just our own which can be accessed when we want to go away from where we are.
He helps, distracts and concentrates, resorting to a parade of amalgamated symbols constructed with the same attention used by the cinema that prepares the spectator for a show of senses and moments that at times strengthen at other times weaken, always making us imaginary protagonists of a fiction that we adapt to.
Rudolph appoints plausible recurring and disparate memories, living in timeless reminiscences, and he calls them to lay down inside the same of a mnemonic click that becomes a collage of melancholy moments gone by, of anticipated instants that never came to be, of painful flashes that, as well all know, sooner or later will happen to us. Making use of clean and saturated climates of counterfeit compositions that are scarily flowing. Rudolph presents baroque illustrations that are blocked without a before and without an after, useful for filling us with healthy and pardoxical improbability of the facts being represented, of a costumed surrealism that studies every minute actorial detail and performance setting. Amongst flaccid weight-lifters in suspenders on top of a table in the middle of everyone, `important´ roofs become stages, as if they had come out Ken Russels screenplay of `Gothic´; a night-time-funeral and an energetic freak that raises up a tractor between phenomena of booth of every weight. Rudolph gives us an impossible benefit, which draws us towards an imagination that indicates everything and everywhere, which recalls everything and nothing, similar to a pantomime of Alejandro Jodorowsky who dances on reality, carefully extracting certain parts.
The images portrayed by the artist appear as if taken right out of a fairytale. They strike as familiar and exotic at the same time. The nostalgic mood of the fin de siecle gleams through them, revealing the mundane savois vivre of the golden 20’s. Yet, these interpretations, which sometimes appear to be painted, converse the spirit of our times. They are staged down to the smallest detail giving a calculated impression to the contemplating viewer, without revealing the last specific context of the story. This way, they challenge the creative spectator who by actively reflecting, completes the work which the artist initiated.
The world, in which Claus Rudolph takes us with his artful scenes, is a world somewhere between reality and fiction, between the actual and the imaginative, between real life and a world of good appearances. It is a game of the expressiveness of aesthetics; scenes of people as fictitious characters in an audience centred mythological setting that completely swells up in their role of the rising conceited self.
The photographs speak out of the absurd, the decadence within, the fashionable and the romantic reach out and remind one of the pictures aesthetics from Federico Fellini movies. With their presumed snapshot style they conquer the meaning with the here and now and become archetypes in which life’s plans manifest themselves, which icon-like rise above themselves, becoming a narrative of their roots, in which the map of life is laid bare- life plans that hints of a short story without beginning or end, life plans that speak for themselves and touch us more than we anticipate at the moment of viewing. You will experience how the photos of Claus Rudolph penetrate your mind and how the images echo, today or tomorrow, within the activities of your memories. The recollection of these images are supported by the intensity of colours, by the sonorous rich contrast, through the large format and the monumental settings, which also work powerfully and compellingly through their perfectly choreographed scenes projecting their strength and radiating from the pictures, leaving a striking impression.
