Rudi Mantofani is a sculptor and painter. While Rudi's sculptures are focused on form and scale and the metaphorical, his paintings revolve around landscape. His electric guitar sculptures, featured in the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6), are inspired by his viewing of a benefit concert in New York. The gap between American philanthropic rhetoric and the harsh effects of its foreign policies in the Muslim world led the artist to create a series of distorted guitars, as a means to express such ethical contradictions. Perfectly inaccessible, these guitars frustrate our desire to hold them, play our fingers across the strings, release their magnificent chords. The guitars are gorgeous and Mantofani has fastidiously crafted them himself from scratch, so these impossibilities are deliberate; these are not transformed ready-made objects, they are custom-made affronts to common usage and common sense. He also participated in the 2011 Guangzhao Triennial in China.
Read MoreTo Rudi, all things must have communicative power as well as a life of its own, which humans do not need to understand. Since the time of the Industrial Revolution, humans created and fabricated objects with functional content, so that our understanding about them is limited to their utility value. In Rudi’s objects, the aspect of function has been deliberately removed; or, if it is still there, it is no longer considered important. History records that there was a tendency to present ready-mades that deliberately minimize the personal touches of the artist. He sees such process as an act of appropriation as well as of critical intervention towards the material culture around us. Mantofani connects with the mature, sophisticated nature, simple because it rejects unnecessary complexity.
Julie Ewington translates in her article on Mantofani in the APT 6, "Rudi Mantofani makes beautiful objects and paintings whose crisp surfaces and precise fracture suggest absolute certainty. Look again, for every one of his sculptures...is aslant, oblique, bent."
Rudi Mantofani is a sculptor and painter. While Rudi's sculptures are focused on form and scale and the metaphorical, his paintings revolve around landscape. They provide new interpretations to the grand tradition of landscape painting, constantly challenging the genre through daring visual ploys, such as flattening the pictorial space through heavy repetitions; or mischievously pushing and pulling the pictorial space.
Text courtesy Gajah Gallery.
