Bernd Ribbeck: Monument Valley

Galleria Norma Mangione hosts Monument Valley, a solo exhibition of works by Bernd Ribbeck, with a new series of paintings.

Ribbeck’s cerebral painting has deep roots in matter: the colour is macerated with sedimentations and erasures, and transferred one layer at a time to create intersecting volumes. The three-dimensional nature of the artist’s surfaces emerges from wooden panels, conveying their physical tangibility. His technique contrasts disorderly, washed-out expanses of colour with straight lines and volumetric, angular shapes. He works by creating superimpositions, scratching the acrylic colours with knives and spatulas, alternating them with the marks of ball-point pens and felt-tip markers.

Adopting confusing perspectives, Ribbeck paints impossible places and inaccessible worlds. His are little windows on axonometric landscapes, with geometrical staircases going up and down, recalling Boll’s surreal architecture and the post-modernist designs. Like the buildings in the Invisible Cities, his structures only gradually reveal their content. Monuments to the potential of creativity, dichotomic outcomes of the imagination appear as spaces of the mind and as utopian fantasies.