Robert Ruello
Signal Spirits
Fooling AI #1, 2022, acrylic & flashe on canvas, 84”x60”
November 8, 2024 - January 24, 2025
ROBERT RUELLO: SIGNAL SPIRITS
Essay by Surpik Angelini
Founding Director
Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
OCTOBER 2024
Robert Ruello's artistic practice evolved after the Neo-Expressionist art movement broke into the global art scene in the 1980's. Thus, as predicted earlier by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Ruello noted that art derived from mass media and the process of reproduction -had indeed lost its "aura".
A turning point in his life occurred when, as an undergraduate student at the Chicago Art Institute Ruello had a chance to work at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Among his many tasks, such as removing trench fries from the heads of exhibited dinosaurs, he also handled precious Northwest Coast Indian objects. This intimate contact with ritual artifacts awakened in him a keen interest in "re-investing" that lost aura back into the art object.
Ruello's natural inclination is to collect and unravel the meaning of uncanny stories, mysterious objects, secret emblems, and other coded material. Those ideas are widely available for discovering, viewing, and exploring in today's internet-based world.
The visual language of coded hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing, Mesa-American codices, and alchemical emblems have fascinated Ruello. The surprisingly banal content of the glyphs was also a revelation. For example, the famous Rosetta Stone is actually just a governmental declaration -as opposed to containing ancient wisdom.
This unexpected type of announcement has animated Ruello's curious and passionate search for unique contemporary stories ... where daring individuals bucked authority to avert global danger or prevent major disasters. Many of these stories are sourced from WW2 and the subsequent Cold War era. His art also speaks to a deeper understanding of the tremendous historical impact a single, courageous act can have for communities and humanity.
Ruello's paintings seem deceptively simple. They first appear as monochromatic abstractions. But upon a second reading, they contain codes (of the artist's own making) that highlight and bookmark particular historical events.
In our current world, so entrenched with passwords and hackers and data, Robert Ruello's exhibition at Transart signals the wealth of information available to the public through a focused dive into the digital world.
Fooling AI #2, 2022-2024
Acrylic & flashe on canvas, 84” x 60”
Operation Tacana, 2023
Acrylic & flashe on canvas, 84” x 60”
ARTIST STATEMENT
From my beginnings as an artist, I have used technology as a tool and as collaborator. I first used a copy machine, but now I use a computer to sketch and create images. The final artworks are hand painted and drawn, but the sketches are digital. That transition from virtual space to physical space is important to the works.
The glyph shapes that populate the paintings and drawings are created from digital bitmaps. Many cultures around the world use some form of glyph or codex or pictograph as a means of communication. What fascinates me about them is the variety of information presented from mundane accounting found on early cuneiform tablets to codexes and hieroglyphics exploring the ritual and mythological representations of humanity and its place in the universe.
My artworks explore similar ideas, but through a contemporary device. I am not using the digital glyphs as a formal language, but more as a point of reference. The information presented in the paintings is not complete. Bits and pieces of digital data merge with graphics and text to create the foundation of the image.
The application of paint in multiple layers of translucent color gives a physical presence to that virtual foundation. It also allows me to imbue the paintings and drawings with both presence and meaning.
Contemporary art viewers have access to the internet through their phones. That allows me as an artist to drop clues into the paintings and drawings about a person or an event which the viewer can investigate and discover.
The artworks act as a guide for forgotten or neglected histories to help create new meanings for the viewer in this age of data and codes.
Margo Handwerker
Dean of the Glassell School of Art Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
