Stephan Ruch: Sand-Art Currently on Display at ARTIFACT

I stopped off at ARTIFACT last night to check out some of their current works on display. I highly recommend you stop off and see the work up close and personal for yourself. I was very impressed with Stephan Ruch’s Sand-Art as well as with the art by Sagi Tarbal.

“Watercolor and sand paintings by Stephen Ruch are luminous examples of art devoted to the exploration of the world, which intricately blends elements of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Using stylistic techniques offering the viewer multiple views and a medley of textures, colors and patterns, Ruch‘s vibrant works beckon the beholder to enter into private realms which co-exist within the same picture plane. The artist’s world is filled with organic or naturalistic passages adding the overall auratic beauty.

Many of the works’ finest qualities are triggered by the artist’s uncanny use of oppositional techniques. His compositions include organized color mark making and sand. They reference both the formations in nature as well as interior spacing within the human mind. Added to this are the artist’s allusions to series of complex alignments applied against backdrops, which recall patterns of stained glass and mosaics.

Color is explored in two separate ways. The first is its heterogeneous application, which allows parts of the picture plane to be illuminated part by part as fragments. This insinuates the fragmentation of the world, which discloses itself as a lost totality in acts of perception, slowly yet inexorably. Equally, the artist is in command of homogeneous color effects, which seem to unite larger bodies of spaces together, as large parts of an interlocking organism which is driven forward to a unifying end.

The result is the overall sensation, which suggests a great knitting together of space and time that is symmetrically and asymmetrically related. What makes the Stephen Ruch’s work so vitalistic in effect and so dramatic is his remarkable use of a visual language. His saturated, yet lyrical artworks are the psychic spaces that resonate with our own value and emotion-laded perceptions of a world both atomized and united in a frenzy of space, speed and time.

This is the first exhibition of paintings by Stephen Ruch at ARTIFACT. For more information and visuals please contact the gallery.”