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By Diana Bird
Rappahannock News
Contributing Writer
At the Middle Street Gallery until May 24, an exhibition of oil paintings by Rene Ruffner, entitled “Recent Works”, lifts a curtain on a new phase of his development.
Whereas before he painted highly imaginative, surrealistic works in vivid, Renaissance colors, his present interest is in representing types of people. Twelve of the pictures on view are human faces or figures. Only one is perhaps a portrait, however. The others are simplified, symbolic people where faces are focused upon and sometimes hands are included. In half of them, the eyes are closed or look down, and in others, the eyes seem as if they are looking inward rather than out.
On the whole, I would first stress the subdued colors and their combinations that create a sense of a dream world, one that is sad, perhaps frightening and full of mystery. While there is a good deal of redorange and some yellow in these works, the warm colors are combined with green so that the feeling of calm predominates.
One picture in which this is not true is “Commotion” (No. 15). Here flesh tones, light greens and blues present a bright scene — a falling or fallen angel is being set upon by a goat with large, long and curling horns. The angel’s flying legs and one arm and the goat’s leaping action together with geometrically painted background spaces convey a sense of movement but also an emblematic idea, something like Gauguin’s “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”. Up close, the way the paint is handled makes the picture look almost as if made with inlays.
In this picture I found the angel’s pigtail or queue tied with a red ribbon somewhat incongruous. I also had to look closely at the figure to make the angel’s right arm understandable. The expression on
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