Miguel Nùñez Rauschert

Miguel Nùñez Rauschert is a painter of the « human comedy ».

In his oil-paintings, he depicts bodies hidden and at the same time exposed in ambiguous games of seduction and refusal, of desire and indifference.  Erotic bodies, languishing, abandoned, curled up in withdrawal or on the contrary gripped in the tension of suffering, of resistance or revolt, more rarely relaxed as if liberated by the caress of water or sun or in the movement of a dance.

 

People looking out for each other, ignoring each other : turning their backs, watching each other closely, giving themselves, shying away, an intrigue develops that is often triangular. Men and women sometimes no more than blurred silhouettes, pale, almost obliterated, enclosed in spaces delimited by horizontal and vertical lines as if hidden by screens or passing through mirrors, unable to communicate, memory gone, soul broken, but still standing no matter what.

Portraits also, with a determined look, pensive ; one imagines them bowing under the weight of life, the force of memories, but with the energy of life for all that.

What we see is slices of life with their share of emotions and feelings, thrills and failings, painted in bright colour mixed directly on the canvas, a powerful and physical painting.

 

Miguel Nùñez Rauschert superposes the layers, brings out the transparency leaving visible the underlying colour. The colour has its own life on the canvas, as the accumulated vagaries of life contribute to the construction of the soul.

In his most recent paintings, the theme is boats, steamers and deep-sea cargos, solitary and mysterious masses floating between the elements of water and air, moving lightly into abstraction.  In counterpoint, the tiny fragile silhouette of a man looking out to sea, a colourless street lamp or the broken line of a quay with black railings.

 

Miguel Nùñez Rauschert says he is a figurative painter. Indeed !  But beyond that, the soft line caressing the body and the warm sensuality of matter and colour are paradoxically part of geometrical compositions that are fragmented and intemporal, and invite one to meditate on his ultimate aim.

 

The music of his paintings is silence, a solemn silence that questions.

 

Jean Paul MAS, 2016