"In a sense, Tegeder turns the guiding intuition—what some might call the ideology—of the reductivist tradition inside out: This intuition tells the artist that as more and more of what had formerly been the matter of art could be jettisoned, that is, as the work came closer and closer to arriving at some concentrated essence, the fuller and more powerful it would be; the fewer elements it could have, the more complete it would be. What Tegeder realizes—perhaps more than any of the other artists who have emerged from the semi-secret tradition of so-called conceptual abstraction—is the rather frightening corollary of the reductivist intuition, which is that when the artwork is complexified, stratified, and subjected to what Stephen Westfall called the “ongoing cultural condition of hyper-contextualization,” then the work loses its grip on any sense of completion, of wholeness, and becomes ever more fragmented, contradictory, underdetermined, and irrational (in the way an irrational number, such as pi, turns out to be endless). A certain arbitrariness comes into play.”
- Barry Schwabsky for ArtCritical