Michael Raedecker has rightfully been admired for his distinctive coupling of homespun materials and the "high" practice of painting. Often he has used thread and yarn to "sketch" the contours of the generic modern landscape--say, an empty driveway bordered with well-spaced, overly pruned trees--consistently revealing the formal qualities inherent, if rarely considered, in string (known, of course, to the Renaissance painters who regularly employed it for perspective studies). Layered onto a thick application of paint, Raedecker's strands--thin and shimmery or fat and fuzzy--elegantly describe spare lines in space, though their unshakable "craftiness" hints at one of modernism's most repressed elements the domestic.In Raedecker's most recent exhibition, summarily titled "that's the way it is," these dissident strains were far more in evidence. He'd swapped an icy, bloodless palette for one of humid hues (salmon pink, coral orange); his subject matter now included still lifes and portraits, genres rarely compatible with aspirations to distance or indifference. Cotton and wool often left line and plane behind for more "decorative" behaviors--here miming bristly facial hair, there simulating weeds that had burrowed through tarmac. The still lifes could have been memento mori--crab walk, 2003, includes an intricately stitched cigarette, the eponymous crustacean, and a grinning double-handled vase--while the portraits were queasily rendered, gunked-up imitations of works by Renaissance masters like del Sarto.

Michael Raedecker's flowers have a subtle quality of unparalleled grace captured in a glow of intellectual order and mathematical refinement. He presents a canvas and a half as one: a classical and elegant subject doubled, like gliding seamlessly from one film still to the next. The heavily rendered bouquet almost acts as a propellant weight. Stitched delicately along the background, an attenuate tangle of lines provides a further sense of motion. Reminiscent of sheet music, Michael Raedecker presents a painting with the enveloping ambience of a film complete with soundtrack.Michael Raedecker is a big fan of film, especially anything with a grandiose American landscape, the untamed freedom of the west. In beam he paints a lonely cabin in the woods - but this is no ordinary night scene: it's almost like the painting has been solarised. A strange halo glow radiates from the trees, the crackling surface of the ground flickers between positive and negative light like an unnatural frost effect. There are shadows everywhere, distinctly pronounced in a conscious mirroring of the image: a double painting in one. This is a scene which is impossible in nature but completely commonplace in Michael Raedecker's imagination and in spaghetti westerns. Raedecker got the idea from night scenes in old cowboy flicks, which were shot in the daytime with a filter over the lens.