Rudolf Stingel belongs to the new generation of painters who understand painting as a model and a symptom. In 1989, he published instructions which describe the process by which he produces pictures – pigment is mixed and applied to the canvas as a thick paste. A veil of tulle is pressed into the fresh colour with a palette knife, sprayed with silver colouring and removed. The strict rules and the standardisation of the process overturn the idea of the artist as a creator and one who depicts landscapes of the soul and, in addition, they demystify abstract easel painting.

Nevertheless, the pictures have a subtle sensual attraction. The glittering silver skin over the underlying layer of colour and the random traces of tulle which are readable as gestures, talk simply and unsentimentally of materiality while, at the same time, they are areas of atmospheric mood. When he covered gallery walls with carpeting, Rudolf Stingel also created soft, monochromatic colour fields as surfaces on which to meditate. The carpeting, deputising for a mural, is experienced as pure colour presence. The two polyurethane casts of the carpeting are references to ready-mades. They are details from reality but are ironically alienated, quotes from reality but at the same time distanced from it by the material (rubber). Stingel uses new visual means of production and processes, e.g. colour no longer colour from a tube but synthetic material, and thus he finds new pictorial forms.

Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)