Robert Ruello's (born 1958, New Orleans, LA) paintings and works on paper illustrate the disconnect between our immediate act of viewing and the unseen processes that form our viewing experiences, and his work asks us to consider what vagaries exist between reading a painting and reading a screen. Painters have long explored how to depict three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional picture plane, and Ruello’s painting practice has expanded this investigation to recall scientific and technological visual idioms. Evoking a laboratory environment or enlarged pixels on a screen, his work reveals both the structure and the finished product of painting in investigating what he calls “the modern dilemma of seeing what is actually happening in front of us.”
Robert Ruello received a BA in Psychology from Loyola University, New Orleans, LA (1982), a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1987), and an MFA from Columbia University (1997). From 1987-89 he was an artist-in-residence at the Core Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. His recent exhibitions include solo shows at Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX; Lone Star College, Woodlands, TX; Texas A&M University, Commerce, TX; and the group exhibitions Mapping Galveston, Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX, and In Plain Sight, McClain Gallery, Houston, TX. Ruello is the recipient of a Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2010) and a Dora Maar Residency Fellowship (2009). His work was recently featured in New American Paintings, West #102. Ruello was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Galveston Arts Center in 2015, which included works from a 2013-2015 body of work called The Noise of the Stars. His most recent exhibition, Angry Garden Salaad, was at Inman Gallery in 2021. Ruello lives and works in Houston, TX.