For Simon Le Ruez’s second solo exhibition at Vane, the artist presents a new body of work including painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing. The show’s title suggests something definitive, a collision of ideas perhaps; it extends a pertinent invitation to the audience whilst remaining aloof about where this may lead.

With an emphasis on materiality, reduction, deconstruction and remaking, the work of Le Ruez thrives on both aesthetic and psychological tensions. Within this framework, his expanding oeuvre revolves around the thematic fields of longing, concealment, transgression and release. His work aims to blur the distinctions between a number of media and through this a commentary evolves on and around various forms of opposition.

Taking black and white stills from the films of Ingmar Bergman as their point of departure, the large scale works on paper, Wild Victor and Until you remember the feelings of (2011), revel in joyful forms of appropriation, interjecting colour and ambiguous form. Other works align themselves in celebrating the use and associative powers of colour. This may be through the altering of antique postcards, hand painted to highlight a given detail within an anonymous location, as in the Correspondence (Hallentrödelmarkt) series (2010), or through the large-scale paper sculptures and installation works that defy any fixed classification through their spirited aesthetic transgressions.

Simon Le Ruez was born in Jersey, UK, in 1970 and lives in Sheffield and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘As Poison Leaks Away’, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and ‘Unidentified Friends’, Cube Gallery, Manchester (2010). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Agency of Unrealized Projects’, Kopfbau, Messeplatz, Basel (2011), ‘Beyond the Dustheaps’, The Charles Dickens Museum, London (2010), ‘To the King’ (with Maud Haya-Baviera), Collège d’Espagne, La Cité Internationale, Paris, and The Golden Record, The Collection, Lincoln Museum, Lincoln (2009). He is currently exhibiting in ‘Vessel’, George Place, Stonehouse, Plymouth, 22 September – 30 October.