THE FULL CHEEKS OF ROEL VAN DER LINDEN
We are discovering the self‑portraits of Roel van der Linden, a Dutch painter based in Prague, with a curious slowness.
The Apartment on the Fifth Floor
The apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement house in Prague’s Vinohrady district functions as his private showroom. As we tour the paintings, we move from the hallway into the bedroom and then into two smaller rooms where he works. Paintings hang on the walls, lean against them, and several are drying on the floor. There is no mythical creative chaos of the artist’s studio—this is still the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, complete with a made bed and a clean kitchen where no one tracks in paint. Work and personal life remain in balance. On the easel in the workshop part of the flat, during my April visit, he has a canvas in progress with the surprising subject of Archangel Michael triumphing over Satan. “It’s a gift for my girlfriend’s mother,” he explains, pointing out the features of the Lord of Evil. Even though they are only roughly sketched in, you can already recognize the artist’s own likeness. And that is not unusual at all.
A DUTCHMAN IN PRAGUE
When Roel Jeroen van der Linden (*1982) moved to Prague in the summer of 2014, he had completed his bachelor’s degree at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He wanted to continue studying, so right after the holidays he enrolled at UMPRUM in Jiří Černický’s studio. He lasted only a short time. The main reason for his early departure, he says, was a well‑known handicap of Czech art schools: the lack of workspace. Still, he took something valuable from the experience. He connected with two artists who later became key figures in his integration into the Czech art scene: then‑assistant Marek Meduna and fellow student Martin Lukáč. With Lukáč, he created a set of joint canvases for Prague’s Galerie kritiků just two years later, and in 2017 they produced a complex installation for the contemporary art space De Vishal in Haarlem, formerly a fish market. As a trio with Meduna, they then traveled to van der Linden’s home gallery, Kers Gallery in Amsterdam, and later to GAVU in Cheb. And it was again Meduna and Lukáč who invited him this past winter to exhibit as a guest in the show Galactic Love at Prague’s SVIT gallery.
On the other hand, it may be precisely the nature of these group exhibitions—opportunities that van der Linden sees as a chance to step out of his individual creative mode and fully embrace cooperative practice—that explains why we are only now becoming acquainted with the main line of his painting. Credit for the fact that this has begun to happen must go to curator Milan Mikuláštík, who invited him four years ago to exhibit alongside Martin Kochan at Galerie NTK, and last year gave him a solo section at the VDIFF exhibition in the House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno. It was in these two instances that he had the chance, so far on the broadest scale, to present the core of his work based on self‑portraiture.
JUST ME AND THE PAINTING
Self‑portraits have for years made up the overwhelming majority of his painting. He rejects any suspicion of narcissism that this focus might suggest. “I like the purity of painting myself, when the painter paints the painter. It’s a way to remove the unnecessary third element of the subject. It’s not: me, the subject, the painting. It’s just me and the painting. That fascinates me. And at the same time, I’m interested in the endless possibilities of how one can think about oneself. Theoretically, we should be the people we can know best of all. But maybe we can’t—and that’s exactly the topic that interests me.”
The playfulness of van der Linden’s approach is infectious. He fully embraces the postmodern condition, which frees him not only from inhibitions about borrowing and quoting, but paradoxically also does not force him—despite repeatedly tackling the same theme—into a fixed “artistic position” or “recognizable style.” It allows him to create analogies of a particular solution, and to abandon them at any moment and head in a new direction. A handful of paintings won’t reveal much; it’s important to see dozens and observe the shifting interest in certain motifs or relationships, as well as the moment of subversion that sooner or later arrives.
In Czech art, the closest parallel to his approach might be found in the late work of Václav Stratil. Yet unlike Stratil’s often eccentric extremes, van der Linden’s painting remains anchored in a more or less ordinary, unembellished model. He caricatures himself and freely absorbs influences from psychedelic art, surrealism, bad painting, or 19th‑century Romanticism. His painting may be executed with raw spontaneity or, on the contrary, with meticulous smoothness. But behind all of it, one can always detect an unvarnished view of approaching middle age—fuller cheeks, and beneath the beard, a double chin almost certainly implied. According to van der Linden, “maybe we can’t truly know ourselves,” but through continuous observation we can at least try to move closer.
Perhaps because of a certain modesty with which he seems to approach the responsibilities of an artist and painter, he has been settling into the Czech art context relatively slowly. One foot remains in his native Netherlands—not only thanks to the Amsterdam gallery that represents and exhibits him, but also because his collectors so far come exclusively from abroad.
Roel Jeroen van der Linden 