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 concerned with the structures that quietly organize how we read the world. He thinks of it as looking at the order, not the object.

In the representational work, he constructs images that look familiar and then come loose, often by letting the thing that would make a scene function go quietly missing while the scene keeps its full form. In the abstract work, he treats the underlying forces as organisms, forms that are alive and arranged without resolving into objects, painting the way they move, hold themselves, and seem to look back. In sculpture, he assembles symbols to expose what they quietly uphold, or morphs a familiar object until it gives up its own nature.

Across all of it, opposed registers are held at once and left unresolved, peaceful and uncanny, loving and faintly strange. The work is built so that what a person already assumes completes it. Rugg is less interested in what we produce than in what makes that production possible.