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Material Concerns

Tania Rutland’s paintings engage in the way great painting typically does. Her paintings bring us back and forth from the detail to the whole in a careful and slowly unfolding manner. Rutland understands what it means to create the type of world that painting at its best can offer, insisting on our deliberation and resisting, if not challenging, any easy or strict category of understanding. All the while we are kept looking, thinking and questioning.

Most immediately, the paintings suggest a modernist order of contained, repetitive and seemingly self-referential lines and markings. On consideration, however, we recognize this order as tempered by a sense of the organic, suggestions of space deeper than initially perceived and complex personal engagements with theoretical and lived understandings of feminine experience. Rutland brings different poles of perception into close proximity. Questions of abstraction, the referential and the representational move across her intricately worked surfaces.

The artist’s most recent source material is well-worn rags. She has spoken about her late mother’s work as a seamstress, the registration of the labourer’s being in the products of physical labour, and the fact of purportedly tedious repetition. These paintings build on her fundamental concern to translate aspects of her personal experience into an original visual language. At issue is an ambition to address a humanist understanding within the terms of that originality. Sometimes when looking at Rutland’s work we can sense a trace and touch of something more intimately real than the paint’s materiality. Other times we begin to decode the subtle symbolism and, yet other times, we recognize her paintings as operating on more complex and challenging levels.

Broadly influenced by the formalism of Robert Ryman, Prunella Clough’s capacity to distill essences and the rhythm and intimacy of James Hugonin, the autobiographical language of Louise Bourgeois is also pertinent. Rutland ultimately brings these influences forward to offer a great spin on recent developments in painting: she has no fear of pursuing traditional notions of beauty and she responds in an exceptionally significant manner to paint as a material as well as a medium.

Brian Curtin*

*Writes for Contemporary Art, Flash Art and Frieze magazines, amongst others.



If you would like to get in touch with Tania you can contact her at   tania.rutland@ntlworld.com