"5:20 PM" Painting

Rudi Cotroneo is an example of an artist equipped to examine how history is constructed and interpreted through the making of paintings which are intellectually challenging and visually seductive. The artist’s juxtaposition of references from a broad and eclectic range of subjects is reflected in his transposition of the collage technique to canvas. Cotroneo also perceives the connections between art history, music, politics, everyday life and personal experience, which he intimates with a remarkable lightness of touch. In Cotroneos practice the medium of painting is not only examined and celebrated in terms of its history and legacy; Cotroneo demonstrates the enduring contemporary relevance of painting as a way of communicating how we experience the world in which we live. On the painted surface Cotroneo creates a magnificent pluralism that refracts and collides the memory of the past with future recollections of the present. The subjects of his paintings are always physically absent, portrayed through depictions of the environments that they might have occupied. Their invisibility heightens the mystery and artifice of the scene but also removes the most recognisable aspect of figuration from works that ultimately communicate something that goes beyond depiction or language. Much more than the sum of their very disparate parts, Cotroneos paintings make an uncompromising claim for the continuing tradition of the medium. Anthony Caprera