Corey Ruecker is a Los Angeles-based painter propelled by color’s mythic potential. He is gesturing toward a place beyond language, a landscape of possibility glimmering on the horizon. Ruecker’s work translates a dream of a place playfully beyond our waking realm: one that only he knows but the viewer is invited to wander into. Ruecker is making work oriented around the internal and psychological dimensions of a landscape - a hopeful universe just beyond our view. smoke the moon is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of new work by the artist on view from May 17 - June 23, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception on May 17th, from 6 - 8pm.

There is a circularity to Ruecker’s practice. The artist participated in an artist residency in Oaxaca that honed his relationship to an artistic and personal lineage and material. In Oaxaca, Ruecker delved into researching the artistic traditions of his ancestral lineage. There he studied both textile and natural dyeing techniques - both of which have become central to his artistic practice. 

Ruecker’s hand is present in every step of his artistic process. Often working on linen, there is a sense that his paintings have a spatialized lineage woven through their very fabric. The natural pigments Ruecker makes and paints with take on a mattified depth and body across his painting surfaces. A sense of scale and distance is often manipulated in his work, heightening the surreality of the scenes he paints. 

Ruecker’s paintings vibrate with intensity - the life of a color asking questions about history, lineage and place. His use of color is thick, immediate and saturated. The artist uses indigo frequently, its aura and tenacity reminiscent of dream states. Thick skies awash with wide stars and moons ablaze in their own glow glimmer behind renderings of exaggerated animals, vehicles and flora that sprawls across his canvas. His work is simultaneously politically rebellious and utopically silly, painting a future where power grows from the ground up.

Corey Ruecker possesses an ephemeral generosity toward the fleeting and cyclic material of the earthly realm. Ruecker was in a life changing motorcycle accident on June 10, 2023. After weeks spent in the ICU, months of surgeries and stints in rehabilitation centers, Ruecker had re-learned how to walk. He still faced a long road to recovery and making paintings again. While making incredible strides in his recovery, the artist’s right arm, which was previously his painting arm, remains paralyzed. Ruecker has taught himself to paint with his left hand, and his solo exhibition at smoke the moon will debut a suite of paintings made with this new and hard won embodiment. 

Ruecker paints with a reverence toward all that grows. In watching a flower bloom you are also, simultaneously, watching its inevitable wilt. The darkness of the night sky contains within it the implication of the rising sun. There is a continuous pursuit of contradiction in Ruecker’s work and practice. The artist is communicating the incalculable power of the natural world; its metaphysical potency taking center stage. Ruecker’s work is elemental, and foretells a paradisal possibility - an earth drenched in verdant time.