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 