Honor Fraser Gallery presents Rafaël Rozendaal in group exhibition

Sat, Mar 1 - Sat, Apr 5  2014

Honor Fraser Gallery

Honor Fraser Gallery presents Dutch artist Rafaël Rozendaal in the group exhibition “Liquid Crystal Palace: Recent Works with Jeremy Blake“, curated by Rhizome Editor and curator Michael Connor and Nate Hitchcock. The exhibition is on view until April 5, 2014.  

This exhibition is an opportunity to look at Liquid Villa (2000) by Jeremy Blake alongside more recent artworks by Jeffrey Baij, Petra Cortright, Chris Coy, Sara Ludy, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Travess Smalley. By bringing these works together, the exhibition will draw out shared concerns that have been obscured by the passage of time and Blake’s tragic death.

Liquid Villa shifts between lucid, crisp dream architecture and colorful, blurring abstraction, unsettling the viewer between pictorial depth and flatness. These shifts take place from moment to moment, but also within particular scenes. For example, the dark alcoves in his dreamlike villa feature glowing orange torches with jagged edges, suggesting (on a pictorial level) the amorphousness of flame, but (on a material level) the low-resolution artefacts of a too-large digital image. Such passages function in a way that is analogous to facture in painting: as traces that point back to the process by which the work was created. Thus, Blake’s “painterly sensibility” incongruously leads him to call attention to his use of digital tools.

Rafaël Rozendaal presents two lenticular paintings in the exhibition as well as a website installation. In Rozendaal’s work, the abstractions could be said to refer to a distinct tradition from that of painting, one rooted in the very technologies of image reproduction that have provoked repeated existential crises in the painting field over the years.

About Rafaël Rozendaal

Born 1980, Dutch-Brazilian, lives and works in New York. Rafaël Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, drawings, writings and lectures. Spread out over a vast network of domain names, he attracts a large online audience of over 30 million 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.