"This is me doing this"—the first sentence in Jeronimo Ruedi's comprehensive monograph Tuning the Sky is somewhat enlightening of his reasoning: simplicity, in any artistic endeavor, is deceiving as it doesn't work without the artist's clear intention. And deceiving is also the idea that, through straightforward subtraction, the artist could reach such simplicity. Indeed, a conscious ambiguity is the red thread running through Ruedi's oeuvre, a practice critically embracing the paradoxical nature of painting as a medium that tries to resolve energy with matter.
Throughout an extensive look at Ruedi's past three years of work, Tuning the Sky is a journey at the edge of what image-making and image-consumption might still mean. The book features an in-depth conversation between the artist and curator Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa about surface, transparency, intention, not-saying, removal of the self, and the Baroque, among other matters. It also features a series of short texts, glimpses of meanings constructed through collecting and editing quotes—most of which are also paintings' titles—that accompany the rhythmic succession of the images. Like flashes of light uncovering shapes and provoking feelings, these accidental poems complete the book, transforming it into an exercise in transparency where the processual and intellectual endeavor of painting, instead of forcing narratives, gives not-knowing its own space.
Jerónimo Rüedi (born 1981) is an Argentinean artist based in Mexico City since 2015.
