Roel’s Completely Uncovered ROEL
ROEL, an exhibition project by Dutch painter Roel Jeroen van der Linden created specifically for Galerie NoD, is the artist’s latest attempt to further develop the painterly strategies that he has been evolving alongside his traditional studio practice in his recent exhibitions and artistic actions. The foundation of these projects has been painting in public space, the adaptation of various participatory approaches, and an inclination toward large‑format, even in a certain sense monumental, painting. Through these painterly interventions, Roel van der Linden expands the medium of painting into a broader spatial framework in which he examines his own position as painter‑author—or rather co‑author—in relation to a wider material, physical, and social context.
In works such as “1km Painting” (Česká Skalice, 2022), “Cirgus” (in collaboration with Julius Reichel, La Chapelle Saint‑Julien Petit‑Quevilly, 2023), or the earlier project “Unity Through Identity” (Česká Skalice, 2018), van der Linden—beyond his interest in the formal conditions and possibilities of painting—also explores the “limits of the sayable” by reducing the painterly vocabulary to the basic expressive means of color, shape, and their symbolic potential in condensed visual signs such as icons, emoticons, or the minimal unit of painterly meaning: the color gesture.
In the space of Galerie NoD, Roel van der Linden shifts his painterly action toward a purely intuitive, processual, and automatic form of painting, transforming the gallery through a site‑specific intervention into a monumental 3D painterly canvas. At the forefront of this action stands a performative act of painting that, on one hand, makes present—and on the other hand preserves—the physicality and executiveness of the painter’s own body. In the process, van der Linden suppresses any form of recognizable authorial handwriting and focuses instead on the living relationship between himself as the executor of the “performance” and the emerging painting: a painting that is not bound to any traditional mediating, materializing (and perhaps commodifying) medium of the canvas, but exists solely as a temporary intervention in the immovable, empty space of the gallery.
Through this “being here and now,” the project ROEL does not merely open a path to free, unconventional painterly play through the artist’s physical presence; it also allows the unavoidable processes of the subconscious to speak through the painting—abstracted traces of current social events, whether overt or embedded in the social and cultural dynamics unfolding beneath the threshold of collective attention, at the level of unconscious forces, desires, wishes, wounds, and scars of the twenty‑first‑century zeitgeist. His intervention invites the viewer to literally step into this “landscape,” and against the backdrop of elemental painterly gestures, to glimpse—through associative play—the ideological, psychological, or mental energies that may currently be flowing through all of us.
Roel Jeroen van der Linden 