Troy Ruffels is one of Australia’s most exciting emerging artists. He now has a great deal of international experience behind him having exhibited in Sydney, New York, Asia, and Glasgow. But it was not always so. Until his early twenties he spent his entire life in Tasmania, Australia’s stunningly beautiful island state. Yet throughout his childhood and teenage years his imagination travelled ahead of him, not just across oceans and continents, but through star fields and galaxies on a raft of science fiction books, television serials, and a million disparate visual images.
 
In many ways he is the quintessential artist of what theorist Rosalind Krauss calls “the post-medium condition”. What does she mean by that? Quite simply, she has noticed the tendency for many contemporary artists, such as William Kentridge or Fischli and Weiss, to work from project to project, selecting whichever medium is appropriate for the task in hand. Thus, Troy Ruffels has worked as a painter but has also photographed drops of rain on the windscreens of cars; he has photographed migrating birds arcing through the overcast skies; he has, as a sculptor, worked with dozens of car bonnets attached to a northern Tasmanian hillside; he has made public sculpture using ceramic tiles and aluminium plates as well very private art works that have been exhibited in galleries and collected by those that have fallen in love with it.
 
In August 2002 he took part in a collaborative exhibition between artists and scientists at the CSIRO (Research Laboratories) in Hobart, Tasmania. Here is part of what he wrote in the catalogue as a response to seeing some underwater footage made by a camera scanning the ocean floor.
 
“A foreign landscape emerged and dissolved as the craft’s alien lights passed over what was for me an unfamiliar terrain. Fine debris and tiny filaments of life floated timelessly by, carried in and out of the light on the currents; a slow sideward drift of rain or sleet; of how you imagine the night wind carries dust, pollen, or tiny insects.”
 
We are immediately in the realm of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, but I mention this passage to show that in everything he does Troy is also a poet – a neo-Romantic – in awe at the wonders of the universe, the changing of the seasons, and the migration of both living things and of ideas.
 
A few years later Troy has forsaken the cold of a Tasmanian winter for the heat and humidity of an artist’s residency in Malaysia at the Rimbun Dahan studio which he shares with his painting partner and life partner, Anne Morrison. Once again he is painting. Once again he is looking at reflections. Some, as Jane Stewart Director of the Devonport Regional Gallery has written in a previous catalogue essay are found in “the seemingly impenetrable surface of new cars, puddles, glass and hard wet ground. Reflections in such urbane, ever-present fabrics are not something we usually register consciously.”  In Malaysia, Ruffels expanded his vocabulary of reflections and also his lexicon of sensibilities. It is his gift to us that we also see the world in a different way through entering into his world. Constable and Turner did this with clouds; Joseph Beuys and Tony Cragg did it with everyday household objects; Troy Ruffels and Gerhard Richter have done it with reflections – and through reflecting on reflections.
 
In 1803 in ‘Augeries of Innocence’ the English poet, artist, and mystic William Blake wrote:
 
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
 
In these lines Blake was seeking and finding equivalences for the very large and the very small and binding them together through poetry and image. Those same equivalences are to be found in Troy Ruffels recent work – but they are more subtle than a wild flower or a grain of sand. They take more searching, and they are more to do with the transitory than the infinite. There is a sense that if you look away for a moment and then let your eyes return certain shifts will have taken place. Shifts outside you. Shifts inside you.
 
As with many artists, Ruffels new work builds on all that he has made before, all that he has brooded about before. And there is a sense of brooding as well as revelation about his work. It doesn’t, you feel, arrive easily, but it never lets you go.
 
 
-Dr Peter Hill
 
 
Dr Peter Hill is Head of Painting and Associate Professor of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2002 he exhibited his Superfictions at the Sydney Biennale and in 2004 his book Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper won Scotland’s Saltire Award for best First Book of the Year