Excerpt from an Interview That (So Far) Hasn’t Happened
Nose: What’s your deal with Roel anyway? He’s a totally conservative painter. He stretches a canvas and paints himself. Almost always in semi‑profile, which is a completely traditional setup.
Thumb: Sure, the layout is classic. But that’s important, because it lets you read his paintings in relation to the history of portraiture. And you probably get that when you repeat a scheme, the differences and deviations stand out more clearly. I think Roel wants his paintings to show both the adherence to rules and their subversion. Respect and irreverence at the same time. Everything you just listed, I see as a solid base—call it a stage—on which what I’m talking about actually happens. And for the same reasons, he has to paint so many of those portraits.
Nose: But painting yourself that many times… that reeks of narcissism and obsession.
Thumb: He told me the obsessive part is more about his need to paint. And that’s different. Of course, when I look at Roel’s paintings, I see likenesses. But I perceive them more as a kind of flow of pictorial solutions, which we could even read as an anachronistic paraphrase of selfies. Those point to an increased need for self‑affirmation by placing oneself into various coordinates—but in selfies, that escalation comes from the dynamic nature of those coordinates and their constant reshuffling. I think Roel’s paintings enter our lived reality in a similar way.
Nose: And he’s also making fun of all those -isms, right?
Thumb: I wouldn’t say so. He actually tries to draw from them, kind of like picking from the lens filters on Snapchat. In other words, he has a repertoire of possibilities he can apply to that portrait foundation. And because it’s a painterly repertoire, he has to deal with it through painting. That’s exactly where his approach feels the most serious to me. Fine, he might take some derivative of Cubist formal language, but then he has to handle it responsibly so it doesn’t turn into some cheap historical reference. He has to return to the problem of painterly construction and manage it without being merely illustrative. And of course, he leaves himself room to paint something completely silly or funny now and then.
Nose: And do you know how many paintings he’s taking to Bratislava?
Thumb: Not really, though I have a rough idea that this time he wants to show quite a small number. That seems pretty bold to me, because it’ll be harder to create the field you were talking about. But you know what I don’t get? Why he’s painting mountains in those new portraits. He’s from the Netherlands—they have, what, one hill? And in Prague he only gets close to a hill on Petřín at best.
Nose: Maybe it’s so the portraits come across as paraphrases of Romantic painting. Maybe that’s also why he used such smooth brushwork in those pieces.
Thumb: Ah, so you do understand him.
Nose: I wouldn’t go that far.
Roel Jeroen van der Linden 