Ruben Kragt
All substance is contained within the work itself. To view a painting is to take ownership of it.
Ruben Kragt via Studio Omstand, 2019
As is true to some extent for every artist, Ruben Kragt (1988, the Netherlands) relates a specific and personal way of being with his work. His paintings grant boredom, rest, the unspecific and the ordinary an aura of mysticism. But Kragt’s dedication to his medium and subject also contain something else—a study in semiotics, emerging, unwilled perhaps, from the slow act of painting itself. Using a photograph as the point of origin for each painting, the unremarkable nature of Kragt’s subjects is what ends up posing the question, which any viewer cannot help but answer differently: where is meaning created?
