Mark Runge: Peace is Patriotic,

“It became easy for me to tell my stories of warfare and childhood war games, which in my dreams become commingled and at times inseparable,” stated Mark Runge about his practice which is rooted in the tenants of allegory akin to the Pre-Raphaelite movement (1800s). They were fascinated with spirituality, medieval literature, love and death.

Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt’s “Our English Coasts (1852),” is a cautionary work that speaks of multiple breeds of straying sheep near an eroding English coast at the time of Napoleon III’s rise in France. Mark Runge’s own “Angels (2022)” echoes similar sentiments with his large cross shaped wooden crest-like painting depicting multi-colored ducks congregating on the lower depths of a what seems to be a turbulent landscape while the silhouette of a military plane closes in the distance.

Runge prompts multiple entry points to his work…who are the angels, is this a celebration or condemnation or simply an observation?

Like filmmaker, Luis Bunuel’s, Exterminating Angels (1962), we are presented with a trap within a trap of perspectives and scenarios that mirror and challenge our own ethical standards and rational. Indeed, it was at the end of Bunuel’s film that we see a flock of sheep running into a condemned cathedral.

Runge’s own works integrate flocks of ducks, rabbits, bears and other objects commonly found as the constellational make up of most Children’s bedrooms. Ducks, after all, represent purity and spiritual ascension. Leading us to ponder the healing power of art - that which strategist and philosopher, Sun Tzub proposed, “from time to time my name gets out and is heard.”                   

-william cordova