Michael Raedecker (1963)
Michael Raedecker works in yarn and paint. He knows the work of the old masters well, but is also aware of the functional context of painting today. Though a firm believer in the illusions that can be created in a painting, he exposes the limitations of that illusion in his own works by weaving yarn through the linen, sticking fraying threads down with blobs of paint. His technique breathes a contemporary atmosphere, even though Raedecker exhibits the concentration of the old masters, and works within classical genres such as the portrait and the landscape.
Raedecker believes that a painting can never tell a story down to the most minute details, but it can suggest a lot. It is up to the artist to express the meaning of the image, whether it's an interior or a man with hat. Even in the twenty-first century, a painting remains a flat surface, says Raedecker, but this does not make the medium any less appealing. On the contrary, the artist sees a whole gamut of possibilities within that restriction. 'To me it's important that I'm alive now, that I stick with something and hope that my work outlasts me.'*
* H. Den Hartog Jager, Verf: hedendaagse Nederlandse schilders over hun werk, Amsterdam 2004, p.172
