| Rafaël Rozendaal was born in Amsterdam on 6th of June in 1980. His father is a painter, his background is very religious: a Calvinist Dutch farm life. Rozendaal's mother was a fashion journalist in Paris and studied architecture. She is from brazil, her grandfather, Humberto Castello Branco, was the president of brazil in the 60s, a kind of a dictator. He died in a plane crash. They never figured out if that was just an accident or it was a political statement. It makes a nice contrast: a Dutch modest hard working side of the family and a Brazilian spoiled upper-class presidential side. To get a fresh impression of Rafaël Rozendaal, here is his self-portrait: His websites up to today: whitetrash.nl, iamveryverysorry.com, bestkeptsecretintheworld.com, everythingyouseeisinthepast.com, afterlinks.com, wewillattack.com, stagnationmeansdecline.com Rafaël Rozendaal, succeed somehow to absorb contemporary art but keep himself unspoiled from infomercials. I've seen him recently, open an issue of ArtForum with genuine surprise. You don't know this magazine? I asked him. No he replied. How rare! That night, was his opening at the Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles. Two giant hands were projected on the screen, against a red background. There was a a mouse for the public to click. I feel too embarrassed describe what happens when you click on one of those hands. It's not "nice" Check it at www.misternicehands.com. Is this art? Surely not, decide most of the people who were present that night at the EO. But it's not a cartoon either. Somehow it leaves you with a strong impression. And its not even funny. My favorite piece of his, is a flash animation he did for the WhitneyBiennial.com where the user can delete clouds endlessly. But his very best piece is his wewillattack.com. Again, there is no way to describe this piece. Is it that what makes Rafaël Rozendaal a Neenstar ? Maybe it would be better to let him "talk". The following text is from a recent e-mail that he send to me. "If you sneeze on your screen you see the different rgb parts of colors: the drops make you look behind the screen." "There was a time when paint had to be handmade and therefore painters were restricted to studios. When oil paint was first sold in tubes, there were two kinds of artists: Those who embraced the new found freedom and those who rejected it. The latter stayed in their perfectly controlled studio environment, because they liked their old-fashioned blend of paint and they did not trust the new technology: paint from a tube can't be good cause it's too easy. But the tubes pushed radical artists to places they had never been before and out into the open. To lakes, forests, cafes, farms and whorehouses. Good artists embrace their times and are not afraid of trying new things." "I know many people, both designers and artists who use the computer every day for years and still think of it as a tool. These people surf the web to find scraps to fill real space, but can not see the web as world of its own. My computer, is not a tool, it's a space, a world, a landscape. It's screen has more dimensions than real life: in a browser window you can look further than in a real window." "You cannot lose yourself into an artwork if tourists and screaming children are running around in a museum. The web is the most intimate stage for art so far. The internet is a place you cannot touch and therefore it touches you. A world behind glass, like a present waiting to be opened but you cant. A place between imagination and real life, between thoughts and objects." "Sleeping is very neen: you defragment your thoughts, you clean your hard drive. Insomnia is a very telic state of mind: you feel guilty to relax. I like neen cause I never asked for it to happen, it was there waiting for me." " I see my work as something close to painting: you move the parts around until there's a tension, a friction. The pieces are moving, but there's no beginning or end, a place between moment and motion. its like trembling, like hot air that changes your view and makes you lose focus. You use parts to create the work and hope for it to become alive, to transport itself and start to live a life of its own in the public domain." "The void is beauty, something that doesn't fit, something that should not be there, something that is out of place. it doesn't add up." |