Mensenmensenmens

‘Life, death and love’ – this is how Vittorio Roerade (1962), an artist from The Hague, once summarized the themes of his work when asked about it. He touches upon large, romantic subjects, but does so in a light and almost casual manner. Take the small Dubbelportret (Double Portrait) (2000), which is typical for Roerade’s painting if only for the unusual mixing of techniques. The painter combined the millennia-old technique of encaustic painting with that of photo-collage. The result is a double portrait in an uncommon sense of the term: a symmetrical pattern of two pairs of eyes and a mouth materializes under the surface in the blood-red painting constructed from thick layers of beeswax. What at first glance appears to be a schematic portrait turns out to be a visual puzzle in which two different faces can be seen simultaneously. It is an amorous painting, an expression of mutual connection. The figures flow into one another and share the same mouth. They appear to kiss each other. The fleshy double portrait, with its piercing eyes, is sensual and moving rather than sinister. The delicate little painting makes the vulnerability of the human being physically palpable. Once you know that the artist’s sister has passed away, you can never look at the work in the same way again.  Other so-called ‘wax portraits’ from the same period also form sensual, playful riddle. Some contain larger constellations of eyes and mouths which do not only form portraits but kindle associations with stellar systems. 

What makes Roerade such a remarkable artist is, in part, the great visual diversity of his work. In each new painting he seems to re-discover himself. The thematic consistency in this abundance of expressive forms can be seen in Roerade’s first solo exhibition at the GEM Museum for Contemporary Art in the Hague where, in the summer of 2006, Roerade presented work dating from 2000 onwards. Using unorthodox techniques he repeatedly creates an associative, fairy-tale-like figuration. The ‘wax portraits’, for instance, were followed up with panels that he painted, perforated, and covered with epoxy resin. The Wanderer (2004) is made up of a hallucinatory pattern of thousands of drilled holes forming concentric circles. With some difficulty, one can discover text in this cosmos—in addition to the text of the eponymous U2 and Johnny Cash song, there are also lyrics from Iggy Pop’s song The Passenger: ‘I am the passenger / And I ride and ride / I ride through the city’s backside / I see the stars come out of the sky / Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky / You know it looks so good tonight.’ Recently Roerade has been preoccupied with quantum physics and chaos theories. The notion of connectedness, which had already played an important role in his work, now took on a cosmic dimension. ‘We are all made of star dust,’ says Roerade. ‘The difference between humans and animals is relatively small; all life is connected.’ While he had already regularly interchanged photo-collages of human eyes with animal eyes in his wax portraits, now a real zoo of creatures made its appearance in Roerade’s paintings. The creatures are endearing things, somewhere between people, fantastical beings, real animals, and plush toys.  Often they are compositionally held together by a web-like structure which can be interpreted as the ‘fabric of the universe’. A stylized form most reminiscent of Mickey Mouse or the man in the moon appears in the center of The Wanderer, for instance. Roerade’s most recent paintings are large in size. More than ever, they are complex visual puzzles boasting a profusion of motifs and composed from paint, embroidery, glitter, hair, epoxy, powdered metal, and pieces of wool. 

Roerade belongs to a generation of ‘metro-painters’ who seem to form a gentle counterpart to the macho-painter violence of the ‘new wild’ artists who made their mark in the 1980s.  ‘Mensenmensenmens’ – ‘Peoplepeopleperson’ – is the programmatic title Roerade gave to one of his works and to his exhibition at the GEM. An almost child-like amazement about life and human relations lies at the basis of his work. Roerade’s curiosity is perhaps best seen in his sketch books, which form the linking factor between everything he creates. In countless delicately-drawn notes, he makes observations, connects motifs, feels out possibilities for future works, and reports on existential doubts and everyday worries. Each work by Roerade can be conceived of as a cosmos unto itself that the viewer can roam around in like an explorer. His paintings have an unabashed, exuberant beauty and appeal to empathy – qualities which, for a long time, were considered ‘not done’ in visual art. Roerade’s universe is permeated by a Lust for Life, to use Iggy Pop once again, which is infectious when you try to penetrate it.

Roel Arkesteijn

Curator GEM, Museum for Contemporary Art, The Hague

FASOSA ( From A Series Of Small Accidents )

Whoever views the work of Vittorio Roerade sees an exuberant variety of motifs. Large round faces of teddy bears upon which is superimposed a spiraling text; a cloud of beings – half animal, half human – floating next to and under one another within the image; or a network of branches in which tiny birds and animals are found. The appearance of these forms logically relate to the development that can be found in the diaries that Vittorio has scrupulously maintained since the beginning of his career. On the pages of the diaries, ideas heve benn developed and new motifs expressed in drawings. The human being, human relations, and the relationship of the individual to a greater whole are always central to his work. Out of a strond interest and a deep involvement with these concerns, his work represents a search for insight into those relationships and into himself.

Througout his entire oeuvre the portrait plays an important role. It functions as a mirror to the world: the self-portrait reveals one’s essence to others just as one recognizes characteristics of oneself in the face of another. In the early paintings, Vittorio focuses on portraits of others that are primarily based on photographs. The images are often emotional and penetrating, such as the portrait series of American fighter pilots who were shot down and imprisoned during the first Gulf War. You immediately undergo the fear and desperation that radiates from their unshaven and battered faces. They are painted realistically and impastoed: the brush technique makes the paint surface, at once, lively and unruly. Besides the more traditional portraits, the early paintings and gouaches also reproduce facial parts, such as eyes and noses; as well as body parts, such as feet and hands. Numerous eyes are often placed next to one another on the canvas. Their individual meaning is lost and they are transformed into a pattern of round forms in which the black dot of the iris always forms the nucleus. With the body parts, the focus on pattern  is achieved in another manner. The palm if a hand, for example, fills the entire image so that all attention goes to a system of lines that branches out onto the skin.

After this essentially objective and observant manner of working, the need arose to delve more deeply into the subject and, at the same time, approach it more freely. Relying on photos of himself as a young boy, Vittorio looks back at his youth to evoke the image of a child still at the beginning of his development. The little black stripes that he often paints over the mouth symbolize this. The little boy certainly has an alert look, but he is still immature and unable to interpret the world independently.

At a certain moment, Roerade, a born painter, made a remarkable decision and began to clip eyes and mouths from photos and paste them directly onto the painting. In one such work, the result was an extended collage with photos of snakes that combine to form a tree that branches out. A more radical step follows with a series of paintings in which body and portrait meld together. Because each contour of the face is missing, the portrait is strongly alienating: the eyes and mouth seem to work themselves through the skin to the exterior. It is simultaneously fascinating to see how photographic fragments, that we normally would experience immediately as realistic elements within the painting, transform the eyes and mouth into spectral features. Additionally, the more traditional portraits are altered by omitting the eyes and mouth from the face, or by overlapping two faces. In a double portrait, for example, both figures have only three eyes because the left eye of one coincides with the right eye of the other.

These changes mark the beginning of a development in which the portrait is approached as a phenomenon and its psychological identification retreats to the background. In the full body portraits, Roerade begins to work with beeswax and pigment. The wax is applied in thick layers around the eyes and mouth, giving the pictures a strong physicality due to the transparency and plasticity of that material. He subsequently switches to epoxy varnish to achieve a greater transparency and layering in the work. With this substance, the handwriting of the brush work, so strongly present in the earlier paintings, disappears. The forms rendered with oil paint dissolve in the epoxy and acquire fluent contours. In a peculiar way, the paintings have something almost tasty albout them with their shimmering epoxy coat in which the oil paint takes on an unusually saturated intensity. The face becomes increasingly simplistic until there remains only an image of a round contour within which are two dots for eyes and one for the mouth.

With the face completely brought back to un atmost simplicity, space is created for bringing in new elements. Around the faces, with their round eyes and closed mouths, appears a wreath of little song birds who seem to be busy chirping. These elements break through the severity and closed look of the faces. They become more and more like animals or teddy bears with human features.

Besides the portraits in which the individual occupies a central position, Roerade began to develop networks of banches and spider webs in his diaries, drawings, and watercolors.

This fascination with patterns and connections was already present in concrete form in the early work in the close up of lines in the palm of a hand or snake tree, for instance. The network now becomes an independant motif.

It can be conceived of as a system of connections between individuals, but also as an ultimate fundamental structure from which all matter is built up: the fabric of the universe.

For Roerade the universe takes on a playful and poetic form. Teddy bears and birds are here the atoms that move through the network, as if in a free dance. At a certain moment, within that network, texts emerge which are often borrowed from pop songs that relate to love or praise the beauty of existence. Such texts later appear in portraits where they are spiraled over the face. They consist of dots that are drilled into the smooth epoxy varnish. Apart from their function as carriers of the word, they act as an abstract pattern that lies over the image like a starry sky.

In this manner, portrait and network are combined. In the most recent paintings, the intermingling of the network and the individual is continued. The pattern of lines is less dense, so that the animals are given greater freedom. Later, the pattern disappears and is replaced by a human figure that is centrally located as a silhouette within the image.

The animals that originally moved freely through space now emerge from the silhouette giving rise to a wonderful new symbiosis. The systematizing network has become superfluous and is replaced by one carrier: the human being that is directly connected with the animals, like a tree that bears leaves and fruit.

Here the circle seems to be complete: human, animal and stucture have come together. If, however, we look back at the oeuvre of an artist who has always sought renewal, we realize that this development is not yet complete. Vittorio’s love for painting and his intense desire to express his experience of the world is a guarantee of that.

Maurits van de Laar