I met Brian at around the same time as Brenda. He is a dear firend of Randall Morris’s. As we spent alot of time together in those early years. I grew to love Brian he is truly one of the nicest, most decent men I have ever Met. He is also one of the finest painters i have ever met and a early influence on me. I loved his work from the first time i saw it. I follow his progress like a stalker ….amazing art….amazing man
Brian Rutenberg: Forum
Art in America, March, 2009 by Gregory Galligan
BRIAN RUTENBERG
FORUM
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The mural-scale, oil-on-linen abstractions in Brian Rutenberg's 2007-08 "Palmetto" series are as concrete as they are indexical, drawing the viewer's attention to their variously accrued and compiled surfaces as frequently as to the underlying organic topos. A native of South Carolina's Iow country (the region around Charleston), but based for over two decades in New York City, Rutenberg refers in his expansive canvases to a long history of semiabstract landscape painting that extends back through early Cubism, to Cezannean Post-Impressionism and the French Barbizon circle. There is something of Corot, Rousseau and Daubigny in Rutenberg's multiple ascending forms, cropped abruptly by the upper limits of the linen support, the dense tracks of paint suggesting lush forests shot through with a plummeting, resplendent light. Yet unlike the palette of any of his predecessors, Rutenberg's highly saturated colors appear, in many places, to flow directly from the paint tube, ultimately clotting the picture surface like dense deposits of mortar, mud or mineral sediment. Such compositions loom before the viewer with the tactile immediacy of a stone wall.
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Elsewhere, the viewer's gaze darts restlessly about the picture plane, pausing only fleetingly in various pools of pigment whose tones suggest watery pockets of reflection in humid wetlands. As seen in the pensive Waccamaw (2007) and the bracing Pine Lakes (2007-08), Rutenberg's techniques vary widely within any given work, from scratching into the pigments with the butt end of the brush to stroking the linen with loaded bristles and laying down colors flatly--as if they were sections of flagstone--with a spatula or a palette knife. Rutenberg's highly-saturated purples, greens and blues (among an even wider range of vegetal and mineral tones) may lie closely abutted, like ornamental tessellated fields; just as frequently, colors virtually "piggyback" each other in stepped formation, the terraced compilations extending out from the linen as if begging for prolonged scrutiny.
Transposing his optical sensations into this pictorial yet insistently palpable format, Rutenberg invests the familiar environment of his youth with the sensuous and inherently time-bound experience of their original perceptual mapping. Part visually acute reconstruction, part hazy impression recalled through a scrim of memory, each "Palmetto" painting attests to the inevitably abstract outcome of even the most attentive probing into the landscape of one's childhood.
[Rutenberg's work is on view at Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, N.C., Mar. 14-May 9.]—Gregory Galligan
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