Twisting the classics

Michael Raedecker references classic genres and uses traditional craft to create work with a distinctly contemporary feel

The paintings of Michael Raedecker tread a fine line. Working as a contemporary artist in the traditional media of paint and embroidery, the Dutch artist creates canvases that hold a unique sense of distance, built as much on what is left out of the work as what is visible. The current exhibition of his recent paintings in the Douglas Hyde gallery in Trinity College spreads itself across three standard genres – those of portraiture, still life or nature-morte, and abstraction.

But despite working with painting, exploring these conventional genres and using a traditional craft such as embroidery (this use of thread and yarn has become his trademark), Raedecker is positioned at the forefront of contemporary painting. In fact, due to the weighty philosophical nature of his work, Raedecker could be described as the poster-boy for those who believe that painting is still flourishing; those who signalled its death knell were more than a little hasty.

From Raedecker's point of view, the debate over the relevancy of painting has been brought to a conclusion – but instead of signalling the death of the medium, it merely lifted the main conceptual and intellectual weight from the shoulders of artists, allowing them, in the artist's words, "to shirk off the baggage and declare that now we can do whatever we want." Raedecker also described his decision to work within genres to DHg curator John Hutchinson, revealing: "I slowly started to expand my vocabulary and started to express myself through genre. Now it is abstract, because I want to question these genres and what lies behind them. Sometimes it is just about how we look at an image... what does it mean now, what did it mean in the past?"

The most striking works are the large-scale still life paintings - for which he uses images from old gardening magazines of the 1950s or exhibition catalogues of 17th-century art – and the small series of portraits, which includes two of Adolf Hitler. Raedecker denies deliberately trying to provoke the viewer with such an uneasy subject matter, explaining that he merely wanted to find out what was allowed in contemporary painting: "They are not a provocation towards the viewer but towards painting itself. When I first had the idea to do portraits I thought I can't really do that – and that became the reason that I did. I chose Hitler because I wanted to find out what was permissible in painting. I was interested in the combination of the works: When I do Hitler, what will happen to the other works...."

Raedecker's decision to produce two identical portraits of Hitler imports a deliberately "obsessive element" to the work, toying with the idea of paintings as "fetishistic objects". Added to this, the doubling of the work is also designed to move it away from being about Hitler "the person" to be more about Hitler "the icon". For an artist, who has previously admitted to teetering on the brink of kitsch, without ever explicitly using that vocabulary, the portraits are palpably without any irony or humour, presenting a stark and serious tableau.

Less stern are Raedecker's abstract works, which are created by pressing oil paint through the coarse mesh of an embroidering fabric until mini-structures emerge on the other side. These pieces provide a supporting role to the other works; Raedecker finds them therapeutic to make as they are created back-to-front, meaning the artist has to wait a couple of weeks to see what he has done.

The unusual visual vocabulary and complexity that emerges from the intricate and time-consuming nature of embroidery, and the heavily worked painting element, are in complete contrast to the mounting of the exhibition; a factor Raedecker admits is perverse, commenting: "You spend so much time and then how they are in just one day becomes hugely important." And though the combination of the three genres within one exhibition may seem like a tricky curatorial job, by all accounts Raedecker's work was hung in record time – and with unerring success, both the exhibition and the artist have found a palpable balance.

?More The Michael Raedecker Show continues at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until 23 November. 01 608 1116, www.douglashydegallery.com