Statement

b. 1990, Boston
Based in San Luis Obispo, CA

Charlie Rugg works between abstraction and representation in oil painting and mixed media sculpture. His work is oriented toward the structures that shape what can be known, said, or imagined at a given moment, and toward making those structures visible.

In representational work, he constructs images that surface as evidence of forces that ordinarily go unseen. In abstract work, he treats those forces as organisms, painting their comportment, their implied interiority, the way they move and hold themselves. In sculpture, he sometimes assembles symbols to expose what they quietly uphold, and sometimes morphs a familiar object until it reveals its own nature.

The underlying method is archaeological. Rugg is less interested in what we produce than in what makes that production possible.