Michael Raedecker, by Clifford Elgin

Thinking of Michael Raedecker is a complicated issue. On one hand, his drawings evoke a very distinct and mysterious place. It’s difficult to get the full feel for one of his canvases through a reproduction alone due to the fact that he often uses three-dimensional materials that pop off of the surface. When you combine the string he uses in ‘Ins and Outs’ with the subtle washes of Acrylic, an investigative and confident touch starts to emerge. However, on the other side of the coin, Raedecker has been beating a similar motif into the ground going on a decade now. His images are all ways just barely evoked, involving only enough to fully realize a place and nothing more.

‘Ins and outs’ is a composition that works well psychologically. The eye is naturally drawn to a relatively warm yellow garage entrance. The rest of the canvas is saturated with an oppressive and Raedecker hallmark blue/gray. As dissolute as the composition is, Raedecker has set it up so that the viewers’ eye naturally travels in an arc around the entire painting. First following a wall of trees to the left, a barricade of stones in the foreground, and then more trees again to the right that evoke a thick forest due to the angle in which they sweep back down to the garage. Some of the oppressive nature that comes out in the composition is due to the fact that the entire canvas is oriented to a one point perspective, except for the trees on the left which are hemmed in by the top of the canvas. What seems to be a driveway fades out and is blocked by the stones and a weedy patch. And if that is a garage we are looking at… where is the rest of the house?

While the majority of Raedeckers works deal with exterior images, either of houses or of landscapes at the edge of suburbia, he also has tackled interiors with similar gusto. In ‘Room 5,’ you are confronted with a bed, a corner of a room, and Nothing much else. It’s hard to tell if one is looking into a hotel room, or a generalized vision of a master bedroom. The brown wall to the left could either be wood paneling or a heavy curtain, either way it blocks off a sense of place from encroaching. At first glance, the glasses on the two night tables bring a sense that these are personal objects; but then again they might be accoutrements left for the traveler in every room of a large dormant hotel. An eerie aspect to all of the room pictures is that the ceiling is never included. In ‘Room 5’ if one were to take a person, match them in accordance to the bed, and then gauge the height of the ceiling accordingly, it would logically prevail that it should appear in the picture. But it does not. Because of this you are left wondering at the size of the room, the space not shown. If you also look closely, on the right, the table is floating in empty space; it is not grounded as the table on the left is.

Raedecker fits in neatly with a group of young artists today such as Dzama and his Royal Canadian Art Lodge group. These artists draw crudely, in a child-like manner. This style of drawing harks directly back to David Hockney who is proving to be quite an influence on the younger emerging figurative artists. Hockney’s drawings from the 1960’s were shockingly simple and seemingly uneducated during their day. At the same time, those drawings entertained the viewers’ imaginations by offering a complicated set of semiotic interactions. While many artists today attempt to follow in Hockney’s footsteps, only a few artists manage to pull off this approach with a degree of success. The primary reason an artist is able to make a composition work while practicing in such a manner often has to do with evoking a particular mood or situation that has never been brought forwards before. Raedecker has managed to do so several times, though it is strange how his best pictures often hit the same note of dread or oppressiveness.

It’s difficult to tell exactly how Raedecker will hold up over time. He seems to have found a successful nitch and is working it until his cash cow dries up. Unless he forces himself to grow and move on from these works as Hockney did in the 60’s, Raedecker will fade into an obscure side note. In the meantime, he is an interesting artist to follow and contemplate.

Raedecker Ins and Outs 2000

Raedecker, Room 5 1997

Raedecker, 'Shot' 1997

Hockney, Splash 1974

Raedecker, "The Getaway 1997"