Solo exhibition by Dennis Rudolph has opened at Space Four in Moscow.
The Berlin-based artist engages with one of the most iconic figures in Russian art: Mikhail Vrubel's Demon.
Vrubel returned to the Demon for more than a decade, portraying him seated, in flight, and defeated. His exploration of the figure extended beyond painting: he modelled the Demon in plaster, using a three-dimensional form as a reference for his canvases. Yet the figure ultimately resisted the boundaries of the painted surface.
Rudolph takes this exploration further through virtual reality. Vrubel's "Demon" and "Pan" become the starting points for a three-dimensional fresco - a Baroque theatrum mundi without a frame or fixed scale. Figures expand to the proportions of a cathedral, while the brushstroke breaks free from the surface, becoming volume, fold, and body.
The canvases present fragments of this digital fresco. Rudolph isolates individual sections and reinterprets them in thick, almost sculptural oil paint, giving weight to an otherwise weightless digital gesture. The image draws so close that the figure dissolves into abstraction, leaving the viewer face to face with a fragment of a whole that can never be seen in its entirety.
The Russian word "штрих" derives from the German "strich". The exhibition traces a similar passage: from one language to another, from nineteenth-century painting into virtual space, and back into oil paint.
