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4 Rudolf Stingel Untitled (Topolino) 2002 Celotex insulation board, wood and aluminum 244 x 240.5 cm (96 1/8 x 94 5/8 in.) Signed and dated 'Rudolf Stingel 2002' on the reverse. This work is accompanied by a gallery certificate of authenticity.
Provenance Massimo De Carlo, Milan Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay The radicalness of Stingel’s Cellotex panels is often underestimated. While rejecting any suggestion of being a social, political or conceptual gesture, these works may be some of the most open and brave moments in recent contemporary art production. As with his provocative instruction book on how to make his paintings, Stingel once again gives himself and his work, in their totality, to the public and the viewer. He invites the viewer inside the surface of his work, and allows anyone to make a 'contribution' to it. The critical voice of the viewer becomes part of the work. Like magnetic tape, the artist records the viewer’s reaction to his work – not simply verbally, but physically. If previously, Stingel suggested that anybody can make his paintings by carefully following instructions, he accepts through the Cellotex works that his work can also be a bare blackboard that allows people to vent various individual and collective ideas, desires, expressions or frustrations. The work is transformed into a vessel with which the audience can say whatever it is they need to say. The Cellotex works are like pages of a notebook, or a guestbook where one can complain or express satisfaction, not simply about the artist’s work, but about anything one wishes - from the museum curator’s, to the quality of the food in the cafeteria. Stingel’s work is a self-conscious affirmation of the banality of painting. The more banal a painting, the more liberating it will be. Stingel pushes Fontana’s gesture further and beyond. His work cannot be rejected by the viewer because the viewer is participating in it, is the co-author of the work. That’s why this Cellotex from 2002 is a turning point in the history of contemporary painting. Nobody before Stingel has been able to maintaining the value of authorship and at the same time question it so radically. Cy Twombly’s practice was a major step into a kind of indulgence into the mechanic gesture but Stingel stretched this idea, absorbing the individuality of each viewer. Offering the pristine silver surface to the emotional instinct of any viewer is both an act of total defiance and of absolute courage. The embracing power of Jeff Koons shiny colored stainless steel finds in Stingel’s Cellotex room to work its final closure. The viewer does not simply enter the work through the reflecting surface, but they do physically and almost sexually. The Cellotex are not about the power of images but about the power of creating both images and signifiers. Francesco Bonami Read More Artist Bio Rudolf Stingel Italian • 1956 New York-based Italian artist Rudolf Stingel was first recognized in the late 1980s for his singular conceptual approach to painting. He constantly questions the function, utility and limits of the medium through hyper-detailed stencil work and by way of a lavish bourgeois aesthetic thrown onto bordered surfaces. Borrowing from the Baroque, Stingel sets up a visual landscape from which the viewer expects excess, but that quickly destabilizes the field of vision by creating a perfectly contained work of traditional beauty. In effort to push the effect of painting to its limits, Stingel notoriously challenges questions of authorship by using various materials, including carpet, styrofoam and silver sheets, to recontextualize surface, depth and color. View More Works