Most people know me for my websites. My subjects range from clouds to blood, from hands to farts, from hills to dollars, from doors to fire. A friend of mine asked ‘what is your leading path?’I cannot answer that question yet. RR
Yes, Rafael Rozendaal is an artist internationally known for his animations available on the internet on the numerous websites he registred please note that RR is not a so called “net artist”. RR uses the internet as a complex and infinite tool to create his art. He is a an artist of his own time.
To understand the attitude of this man, born in 1980 in Amsterdam, ones has to make the effort to walk with him along the path of his system of references. From Star Wars to South Park via Magritte and Lichtenstein RR creates, with the tools he favors, a universe composed of many planets that interact with the freedom that qualifies being a great artist.
Recently RR decided to freeze some of his animations into a new series of oil paintings called “FROZEN”.
We all will live soon in a world surrounded with digital media in an immersive Internet. Digital reproduction is everywhere. Only the personal experience will remain unique.
Contrary to John Baldessari who destroyed his pre1966 paintings, in an act of cutting the roots with his past and the history of art, RR has the nerve to use the archaic medium of paint to propose an alternative to the immediacy, speed and instant availibility of the Internet.RR uses the medium of painting on canvas in order to create the special effect of being confronted by a work of art that cannot be reproduced unless it looses its specificity.
These paintings situate themselves at the exact opposite of the multiple experience of RR’s internet hosted animations and are their perfect counterpoint. (The internet experience of the viewer is also “unique” in its own fashion as the the artist has no control of the end user’s harware and situation parameters).
A friend of the artist reacted when RR emailed him some studio shots of the paintings being realized and asked: what type of prints are these? These paintings are not prints, they are meticulously crafted oil on canvases of images frozen from RR’s animations on the internet. For this first series of paintings the artist worked on “Frozen” frames of colorflip.com.
Try to see RR’s paintings, but in the mean time visit newrafael.com
CB
Check Rafael Rozendaal art at onestar press
