Markus Raetz
But what’s most interesting about Raetz’s work is the way it configures the viewer’s perception as an ongoing process. In her foreword to the small catalog, Arts Club director Kathy S. Cottong writes that “experiencing a Raetz work is akin to experiencing Zen enlightenment, the moment of knowledge….Look too closely and it is gone.” Walking around a piece can suddenly cause an image to crystallize, then fade away, underlining the fragility of all imagery, even of knowledge. There is no “right” image here; in Raetz’s view, the physical world has no immutable underlying structure, and our perception of it depends on our perspective.
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From a third position it’s possible to see another “word” in TODO-NADA: a backward N followed by three Os. It’s hard not to read this as an exaggerated “no” or a profusion of zeros, so the title can be read not merely as “nothing to do” or the more affirmative “to do nothing” but also as the suggestion of a more general void. As one circles, one becomes more aware that the letters consist as much of the empty space around them as they do of solid brass forms.
Raetz’s airy watercolors, most from the 80s, reveal a fascination with the changing forms of nature; critic Bernhard Bürgi has written of Raetz’s love for “rocky caves, grottos and crevices from which one can look out over the sea.” Raetz told me that he rarely makes nature watercolors today and added, “My sculpture was not influenced by natural subjects but more by how we perceive.” But because many of his sculptures are based on branches or leaves, it’s hard not to see nature as a lingering inspiration, one that might account for a profound difference between Raetz and many artists who also argue that perception is relative and who joke about past art: Raetz’s work is more whimsical than ironic–there are smiles here but no smirks. Equally important, though his pieces can look minimal, there’s little of the minimalists’ geometrical regularity. Even Raetz’s apparently rectilinear letters are full of curves. Nature’s changeability and general lack of precise symmetry introduce an air of caprice to the Arts Club’s big, open, but almost sterile gallery.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Courtesy Brooke Alexander Gallery.
