Roel van der Linden – There’s no need to complicate everything, things will take care of themselves
The Dutch painter Roel Jeroen van der Linden (b. 1982) has been living in the Czech Republic for many years. Yet the centuries‑old roots of his family lie in what was then colonial Indonesia. How did Roel end up here? He first studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and then—surely to his benefit—continued his studies in Prague, in the painting studio of Jiří Černický (and his assistant Marek Meduna) at UMPRUM. There he naturally met and connected with fellow painters from this studio (David Krňanský, Martin Lukáč) as well as from the neighboring studio led by Jiří David (Roman Výborný, Julius Reichel).
If the common denominator among these colleagues is their movement within abstract or semi‑abstract painterly approaches—while also absorbing social context and intervening in gallery spaces and beyond—Roel is different, and in his own way a more complex author. Painting is, for him, an open field for diverse visual strategies, supported by his excellent technical skill. He handles smooth realist painting just as confidently as various stages of abstraction. It is, naturally, difficult to pinpoint a single factor that connects his diverse visual creations, so in the end one must conclude that it is precisely this diversity that is Roel’s signature.
Still, I would highlight one of Roel’s painterly inclinations: works executed in smooth realist technique that tend toward symbolic or post‑surrealist expression, often with post‑conceptual interventions. Contemporary young painting is today heavily populated with surrealizing narratives, yet few reach Roel’s level of formal and conceptual virtuosity. Roel does not hesitate to combine smooth painting with modernist procedures, and at times he fully succumbs to modernism. He often begins from landscape realism—as befits an heir to Dutch Baroque landscape painting—but across this foundation sweeps a whirlwind of anything and everything, from expressive narration to whatever else can be imagined.
It’s fortunate Roel wasn’t working during the eclectically charged postmodern eighties—he would have been unstoppable. His stylistic surfing of today is already more than enough. I saw him last year in Mikulov creating a long, continuous abstract painting—very long—and that was shortly after he produced an even longer one at an airport. “I painted a 1,067.7‑meter‑long painting,” Roel reported at the time. And since I’m already quoting, let me add a remark by Jiří Ptáček about Roel’s approach to painting:
“A few paintings won’t tell us much; it’s important to see dozens of them and perceive the shifting interest in a certain motif or relationship, while also noting the moment of subversion that sooner or later arrives.”
It’s beautifully written, and it saves me from having to think too hard about what to add. It’s simply intelligent and excellent painting—Roel is like an all‑inclusive museum of modern art. And one more note: he arrived in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2014, for those who love precise dates.
There’s a bit of everything in this exhibition.
Martin Dostál
Roel van der Linden: Un Real / Ne Skutečné
Let us recall those scenes from underwater nature documentaries, where in the bluish depths we see whales, blue whales, sperm whales, and other cetaceans caught and entangled in huge torn fishing nets that bind them, nets they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. This incongruous, foreign element—like shackles in an unwanted, almost surreal symbiosis—stands as a chilling testimony to a collision with civilization.
Foreign, slightly surreal objects floating in the landscape are also a symptomatic feature of the paintings of the Dutch artist living in Prague, Roel van der Linden. Landscape was a popular motif of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s. Surrealist landscapes were permeated and reshaped by motifs and imagery drawn from the subconscious, free associations, and dream analysis, creating disparate, incongruous connections between different elements. The principle of automatism—creation without the intervention of rational thought—was formulated by André Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto. For the Surrealists, landscape often occupies a central position; it does not merely represent the physical world but becomes a stage projecting the deepest emotions, dreams, and fantastical creations of bizarre shapes and forms that defy logic and rationality. The landscape itself is frequently manipulated and transformed into a parallel realm of irrational, imaginary worlds.
Roel’s landscapes, by contrast, remain factual, mostly descriptively real. They interweave the artist’s memories of the Swiss Alps, the Slovak mountains, and the surroundings of Kosoř, where he has his studio. Only occasionally does a part—perhaps a branch or a tree stump—break out of order and seem to go mad, twisting into unreal, sometimes even ominous shapes. It may curl into the artist’s signature, strange serpentine scribbles, or even the crooked jaws of some kind of dragon. Elsewhere, above a peaceful landscape, a multitude of disparate objects float: abstract forms, real figures, or a kind of tangled linear knot woven from branches. We sense citations and references to 17th‑century Dutch landscape painting, and perhaps also a nostalgia for a landscape that no longer exists. Human intervention has transformed it into something tamed, artificial, or even damaged—yet still made to serve. The landscape is inhabited by uninvited elements, contaminated and subjected to a dreamlike world in unexpected tension, leaving the viewer uncertain about what is actually unfolding before them.
It is as if artificial intelligence had glitched and flooded our images of familiar, untouched landscapes with a swarm of bizarre creatures and strange fantastical signs devoid of clear meaning or logic. Are we witnessing a metaphor for the final stage of colonizing and subjugating the landscape, right up to its complete apocalyptic destruction?
Tomáš Lahoda
Roel Jeroen van der Linden 