A luminous, resonant hymn moves through the space. The chromatic shifts of Rödel’s immense and impalpable paintings open an extraordinary window into unbounded space, transcending physicality with resonances poetic and mythic. Subsuming, pulsing color plays out like live theatre; the players, standing like sentries, enveloping viewers into their world. Amongst an assembly of towering works, two paintings measuring a mere 50 x 40 cm even act as enigmatic portals.

Held in a hypnotic state of tension, the paintings hover in a seductive state of intrinsic dichotomies: intimate and sublime, power and vulnerability, before and after. Titles such as Prehistoric Sunset suggest a time unexperienced, while other paintings murmur of a serene utopia, a kind of imagined aftermath. Of these fundamental polarities, there is also the spiritual versus personal engagement, mirroring a spectrum of innate human experience. In this turbulent contemporary moment, we seek the universal, connectivity, a shared way to understand. Beauty aside, these paintings have the ability to stir within oneself all that is human. These works are undoubtedly, formally, as much about feeling as they are about painting, and through their eternal tussle, the artist offers a reflection of our condition.

Fields of floating color, this new suite of works is a treatise on immateriality and an affirmation on the power of color. In the painting Prehistoric Sunset M I (2022), glowing violet radiates through a black veil, giving fullness to void as an unsuppressed luminosity breaks through. It is Rödel’s handling of color that unbinds and opens the picture plane. Spellbinding passages of color are without beginning or end. Ambiguous transitions of tonalities – a cloud of rose that develops to plum gray or wisps of pale yellow that coalesce with faint green – dissolve the paintings’ surfaces. Rödel’s vaporous clouds are at times defined by visible brushstrokes, subtly reminding us of the artist’s hand, and momentarily, anchoring the work back in the physical world.