The mysterious works of Michael Raedecker draw the viewer in like a magnet

There is danger lurking in the work of Michael Raedecker. As you read this, it lurks just beneath the surface of about fifty canvases in Kunstmuseum Den Haag, where a major retrospective of the Amsterdam-born painter is on view.

That underlying tension may lie in the unfathomable nature in his paintings – nature that seems to want to overshadow and overgrow buildings again and again. On Ins and Outs for example, which shows a brightly lit garage in a dark landscape, a climbing plant on the facade carefully begins a sprawling path in all directions. Small plants and grasses crawl between the grout of the garden tiles, tumbleweed seems to be blowing around the garage, and in both the bottom left and top right corners the wilderness takes its first step.

And yet, remarkably, the opposite may just as well be true: that the danger lies in all those human structures – houses, balconies and swimming pools reminiscent of American suburbs and villas. And perhaps even more so in the human being himself, who is conspicuous by his absence on Raedecker’s canvases. Because in all those Material Worlds that you see, as the title of the exhibition states, there is not a living soul to be seen anywhere. However, every now and then there is a sign of life on screen: there are drinks on a garden table, there are cars with open doors, the hallucinatory Un (2008) depicts an empty garden full of festive lights. But the fact that people always seem to have just left increases the mysterious, charged atmosphere, the feeling that something is in the air – but what?

Since the beginning of his oeuvre, which now spans more than thirty years, Raedecker has combined painting and drawing with embroidery. On his often extensive canvases he stretches tight lines of yarn and woolen threads, makes embroidery and creates exciting, messy thread structures. Sometimes pieces of fabric, sequins or pieces of mirror also make an appearance. And for about eight years now, Raedecker has also been making frequent photographs of his paintings, just as he did at the beginning of his career, which he edits on the computer, prints and further edits with paint and wire. Material Worlds shows his oeuvre not chronologically but associatively and thematically, sometimes also arranged by colour, and makes visible how consistent this is.

The different materials Raedecker works with create a nice tension: while the regularly uncanny paintings create some distance from the viewer through theme and composition, the unusual materials ensure that they are drawn to the canvas almost as if by a magnet. After all, there is a lot to see, it is a pleasure to zoom in carefully on all those beautiful threads and delicate strands. Sometimes the unruly threads even grow out of the canvas, into the audience, as if, as you call it in the theater, breaking the fourth wall.

What is also fascinating about Raedecker’s paintings is that they often contain a large, light surface that forms a kind of ‘second canvas’. There are several paintings of empty interiors with glass fronts, where the viewer looks out from the inside as if at a theater set or film screen. And there are exteriors of buildings where the viewer would like to look in through the windows from the outside, but where this is impossible. And reflective pools and swimming pools, whose mysterious water surface almost seems like a portal to another world.

Such a second canvas often looks like a more or less blank canvas, an open invitation to project what we want onto it. But at the same time the viewer becomes aware of their own limited field of view, of how much is out of view, how much remains unseen. Therein also lies the threat. It is not without reason that Raedecker plays again and again with curtains in his interiors – a safe, soft material to create an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ and to hide secrets from view.