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January 9, 2008 4:18 pm
Lisa Ruyter’s streamlined, acid-hued large-scale paintings of socializing hipsters, unconventional holiday locales, and slinky models sashaying down catwalks made her Gen X’s answer to Alex Katz. In the Katz tradition, Ruyter’s work illustrates her era’s image of an ideal urbane lifestyle—and, like Katz’s, it hangs in some of the most glamorous apartments in New York. But while her paintings have his distinctive paint-by-number quality, they’re autobiographical rather than generic. Ruyter takes personal snapshots and transcribes them onto canvases, outlining the forms with a bold border and then filling in the shapes with her signature palette of mint green, tangerine, dusty lavender, and teal. “The Comfort of Strangers,” her third solo show at her Paris gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, which opens on January 12, consists of new paintings of crowds. She explains her interest in tightly packed humanity as a desire to depict “that feeling of being alone in a crowd, the kind of energy that surrounds you, which can be at one minute exciting and the next claustrophobic. This situation for me is a really good metaphor for that thing I often try to get out of a painting, that tension between understanding and confusion, representational and abstract.”
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