Nordin Gallery Catalogue 22 - Rafaël Rozendaal

Rafaël RozendaalNew Information

19 November— 18 December

Exhibition No 22 | 2011

Rafaël Rozendaal Born 1980, Dutch-Brazilian, lives and works everywhere.

Rafaël Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, drawings, and writing. Spread out over a vast network of domain names, he attracts a large online audience of over 12 million unique visits per year. His work researches the screen as a pictorial space, reverse engineering reality into condensed bits, in a space somewhere between animated cartoons and paintings. His installations involve moving light and reflections, taking online works and transforming them into spatial experiences. He also created BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), an open source DIY curatorial format that is spreading across the world rapidly.

Selected exhibitions: Venice Biennial, Valencia Biennial, Moca Taipei, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, TSCA Gallery Tokyo (solo), Spencer Brownstone Gallery NYC (solo), NIMk Amsterdam (solo), Stedelijk Museum project space (solo).

Selected press: Flash Art, Dazed & Confused, Interview Magazine, Wired Magazine, Purple Magazine, McSweeney’s, O Globo.

Nordin Gallery Exhibition No 22 | 2011

Rafaël Rozendaalb. 1980, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Nordin Gallery | 22 | 2011 — 5


InterviewA lot of your work seems to be about endless-ness, an endless mountain range or a deep black hole or thepersistenceofsadness.com. But this infinity runs up against the limits of at-tention, of the time the viewer is willing or has to spend. Does anything last forever?

Our perception of time is very primitive. I expect some major discoveries very soon. The earth was once thought of as a flat surface with the universe rotating around it. It turned out we were seeing things in a limited way. The ideas of past, present and future must be false because they are very problematic. There is no now, by definition, we are to slow to witness it. Everything we observe has already happened. I believe that once we realize that time is not an absolute force, our lives will change drastically. All our concepts will be wiped out and rebuilt from the ground up. Imagine ma-nipulating time as you desire. We will have to rethink our purpose in life. The consequences will be so severe it is impossible for me to really tell you what life will be like. Without time limits there is no scar-city and no one will ever be busy. The idea of work, necessity, all gone. Boredom would be the new frontier. Imagine having no obligations, and having millions of years in front of you. I avoid making im-ages that have a beginning or an end. I like the idea that time is frozen but everything stays in motion. Images behaving like waterfalls, always moving but never towards a destination.

Your work requires action from the viewer, in addition to the act of viewing, and I’m curious whether you think the internet — and your web-based work — creates a sense of the surety of consequence, that we click and something happens right away, and it’s the only thing that can happen. Is interactivity a demand?

Somewhere in the 1400′s in France, a church was built. The stained glass windows were colored with a new pigment that was bluer than anything anyone had ever seen. The church was finished and the visitors looked up and saw this incredible light. They were convinced they were looking at heaven. Not a picture of heaven, they were convinced they saw heaven itself. One of the strangest things in our time is the use of the word “virtual”. For centuries we

have known drawing, painting, writing, cinema, all of them are very virtual. Money is virtual. Phone calls are virtual. But now that the screen is interac-tive, people call it virtual. Visual interactivity has been thoroughly explored in video games. Mario starts running when you press a button, and he runs faster when you hold 2 buttons. But video games are always goal oriented. Interactivity is usu-ally a means to an end. What if it is a destination? As children we are taught not to touch things, even if we instinctively want to. When we look into the world, we are not distant observers, we are in-volved. I am interested in this area of perception, looking into the world, using our eyes as well as our hands.

What would you be doing if the internet didn’t exist? Or, what can you do only because the internet exists? There’s something lovely about medium-specific work or era-specific work — that it has to be exactly as it is, that it captures the time in which it was made, and so forth — but what changes and what doesn’t change?

It is hard to imagine living without the world wide web. The true power of the internet is the lack of authority. You can start a magazine or a TV channel in a second. My ideas seem quite silly and insignifi-cant when I start making them. The internet is per-fect place for things that seem irrelevant. There is no editor, curator, or gallerist, telling me what to do and how to do it. I can imagine that in a world with-out internet, I would be forced to make things that make more sense. But irrational and intuitive work has existed before the internet so who knows, may-be I would have found a way to do that even without the world wide web. I just want it to be clear that I am eternally grateful living in this time, doing what I want to do every day and sharing my work instantly with everyone.

What tools do you use to make your work? What is your favorite tool?

I’ve been drawing all my life, first with pencil, later with ink. I never really liked to paint, although I love paintings. I liked photographing a bit, but photogra-phy doesn’t really connect with my perception. At some point the computer came along and I played around with drawing programs, getting to know the mouse…I did not start seeing the computer as an artistic tool until I discovered vector softwares. Vec-

tors are mathematical shapes, not made of pixels, but of points and curves. Once I got into it, it felt like being weightless. Copy, move, drag, change color, warp, adjust, scale, duplicate, moving perfect shapes in an infinite space. There is nothing like it.I always enjoyed mathematics, and vector software makes you feel like you’re in a mathematical world. There is nothing on earth that is mathematically perfect, and even if perfect objects existed, our eyes are too imperfect to see them. But spending time using vectors makes you feel like you’re ma-neuvering in this ideal conceptual world where square are really square and circles are really round. A world without noise or distraction.

Another artist, Agnes Bolt, recently created video interpretations of some of your online work, for example a take on jellotime.com with a finger poking molded gelatin. I loved that in their simplicity they were immediately visually recognizable as takes on your work. Going back to the topic of specificity, many of your drawings and websites seem to strip away — they are, as you say, abstracted, with the mini-mum of cultural markers. Is there some sort of admission in the idea of a universal language that we want to be understood?

I’ve always been interested in abstract paintings. All his life, Mondrian wanted to find a universal visual language. In some ways he did, but in some ways he perfected a very particular style that reminds us of a specific period, and of a specific culture. Mon-drian’s paintings will always remind us of art more than anything else. I’ve always been interested in animated cartoons. Early cartoon characters had to be very simple because each drawing was done by hand. A seven-minute cartoon requires a mini-mum of 10.000 drawings, so you better get to the point. The limitations of cartoons created a very specific language based on exaggeration, simplifi-cation and abstraction. It spread around the world fast and is now recognizable to anyone. It is univer-sal. The art world is full of inside jokes and historical references. Sometimes that’s great, but very often it excludes people. I do not want to exclude anyone. I want to make work that draws people in and makes them feel welcome. A good artist is a mag-nifying glass: guiding sunlight into a focal point. If the artist does his/her job well, the focal point is sharp enough to start a fire.

InterviewXLR8R magazineJan/Feb 2011 issue

“I like the idea that time is frozen but everything stays in motion. Images behaving like waterfalls, always moving but never towards a destination.”

6 — Nordin Gallery | 22 | 2011


“What makes people miserable is stress, which comes from spending more than they can afford. ”


InterviewXLR8R magazineJan/Feb 2011 issue

What do you look for in your heroes? What’s the unifying thread among the artists you ad-mire?

Daily life needs a lot of attention and you can get caught up in practicalities and negative feelings. I need “heroes” to see the big picture, to have a di-rection in front of me. I need role models to know the impossible is possible. It’s good to know it’s OK to be an outsider. Most people I know have a lot of obligations and their days are filled with tasks they do not like. It is very admirable when someone knows what they want, and it is even more admi-rable when they have the talent and discipline to turn ideas into realities. These heroes are observed from a distance so I do not know their daily worries, and it is this idealized picture of them that motivates me.

Sometimes I think that this drive to be function-al and contribute to society and be useful is what makes people miserable, and I mean no offense at all when I say that this is what I love about your work — that, like all great art, it doesn’t have a point. Why make art?

Making art is not very enjoyable to me. The process is quite painful. It is an obsession and a duty but is also wonderful. I think my identity is so connected to my work that if I do not work I feel empty. It sounds negative but at the same time I am really grateful every day that I get to do what I want.Art is more useful than you think. Artists were around before lawyers, bankers, professors, mail-men, all the “useful” professions. It also depends on your definition of art. If you include film, litera-ture, music, it is clear no one wants to live without art. What makes people miserable is stress, which comes from spending more than they can afford. People should stop shopping so they can afford to work less and relax, and leave the hard working to artists. Art is a 24/7 job, every moment is an oppor-tunity, day or night, wake or sleep, even dreaming is work because the best ideas might come from your subconscious.

Collectors can buy your domain names and your work, and it remains publicly accessible. What does it mean to “own” a web-based work, to own a Rafaël Rozendaal piece?

At first it might seem strange, why would you buy something that is available for free? We live in an age of sharing, and everything gets passed around all the time. In this ocean of digital content, nothing has value, except domain names. The old way of collecting is based on keeping a piece of art locked in your house, so you have exclusive access. To collect a website, is the opposite. You own it, and the more people see the work, the cooler it is. Peo-ple who own a domain name know how this special feeling, it is your property, even if anyone can walk in, especially because everyone walks in.

What’s important to you?To feel loved and appreciated.


New information


New information
















Dennis Hopper interviews Rafaël Rozendaal


Dennis Hopperinterviews Rafaël Rozendaal

DH: So Rafaël, where are you from?RR: I’m from Amsterdam. But I’m half Brazilian.

DH: Dutch-Brazilian… sounds like an interesting story.RR: It is. My mother and father have very different backgrounds. My father grew up in a very strict reli-gious farmer’s family. Calvinists. Just to give you an idea: He has 15 brothers and sisters.

DH: Your grandparents had 16 children?RR: Yes. Every child is a gift from God, so you don’t waste time. They never waste time. They either work or pray, nothing in between. The only Bible they read is a 17th century Dutch translation, a version from the days of Rembrandt. TV or radio are not allowed. Prayer 8 times a day, chapters from the bible after every meal. Just work and the bible. It’s a very ratio-nal and responsible religion. You don’t just follow the church, you study the Bible yourself.

DH: And your father is very religious as well?RR: No, not any more. He grew up believing every word of the bible, but at the age of 16 he started hav-ing doubts. The minister would prove the existence of God by quoting the bible. This did not make sense to my father. So he thought about it for a long time and finally told his father. It was a big crisis, they didn’t talk to each other for a year. After that about half of his brothers and sisters followed. For my grandparents, this is their big failure in life.And on top of that their son did not become a farm-er. He went to art school to become a painter!

DH: A Dutch painter… And your mother?RR: My mother is a completely different story. She’s from Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, the most beautiful city in the world. Her grandfather was the president of Bra-zil in the 60′s. Actually more of a dictator.

DH: What’s his name?RR: Humberto Castello Branco. We have Brazilian money with his face on it.

DH: So how did he become dictator/president?RR: Brazil was kind of a mess, the government was very corrupt and the economy was going down fast. So the army decided to take charge of the country, and Castello Branco was the face of this new gov-ernment. Definitely more dictator than president. The days of the cold war… They were backed by the US, to make sure Brazil would not turn communist. My mother always insists he was a good dictator. My Brazilian family is not that rich so I don’t think he was very corrupt. Only 100 dissidents went missing in his term…

DH: How long was he in office?RR: He was president from ’60 to ’64.

DH: What are your memories of him?RR: I know he never touched any alcohol. All his meetings people had to drink fruit juice. And I re-member this photo of him in a cool suit and 3 gener-als with sunglasses behind him. I remember this strange expression on his face. But I never met him, he died before i was born. He died in a mysterious plane crash in ’68. Nobody’s sure if it was a political act. But recently they discovered that just before the crash he was preparing a big speech critical of the government that came after him.

DH: What impact did all this have on your mother?RR: As a child it was all very nice, she met celebrities and spent her time in great places. She met Walt Disney and Mick Jagger, lived in the US for a while, travelled Europe, French tutor, a very privileged life. But her father was very strict. He was the son of the president, and he was to have an army career. He wanted to be an architect. This was out of the ques-tion. My mother studied architecture and in a way she was doing what he had always wanted to do. She was his favorite, which was very difficult, he was a control freak. So she escaped to Europe.

DH: Where she met your father…RR: No actually they met in Brazil. My father was travelling through South America and he met my mother on the beach in Rio. They had a good time and they stayed in touch. My mother moved to Par-is to work as a fashion journalist for a Brazilian news-paper. And so they saw each other all the time and my mother was very charmed by Holland. Very lib-eral, the 70s in Holland.

DH: What do these two opposite backgrounds mean to you?RR: What it means? Like interpreting a dream? I don’t want to speculate which side of me comes from where. It does mean that I had a lot of different impressions from an early age.

DH: And what is the most important lesson you learned from them?RR: Don’t romanticize history.












TheGallery

TheGallery



EnglishNordin Gallery opened in Stockholm in October 2007. The gallery is set up by owner/director Axel Nordin as a project room for young contemporary artists. Our intention is to represent emerging Scandi-navian and international artists, establishing a programme dedicated to video, photography, performance and installation art. SvenskaNordin Gallery öppnade i oktober 2007 på Tulegatan 19 i Stockholm och drivs av Axel Nordin. Galleriet representerar unga konstnärer från Sverige och internationellt. Fokus ligger på fotografi, video, skulptur och installationskonst.

The GalleryNordin Gallery opened in Stockholm in October 2007. The gallery is set up by owner/director Axel Nordin as a project room for young contemporary artists.


Nordinary Art.

Nordin GalleryTulegatan 19SE–113 53 Stockholm

Tel +46(0)706 934 [email protected]

Opening HoursThursday – Friday 12.00 –17.00Saturday – Sunday 12.00 –16.00Or by appointment

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Nordin Gallery Catalogue 22 - Rafaël Rozendaal