Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Details by Rafaël Rozendaal. This marks his first exhibition at the gallery in approximately two and a half years, following Screen Time in 2022. The exhibition features the Manual series, in which Rozendaal gently transposes his long-cultivated sense of digital composition into the tangible language of painting.

 

Rafaël Rozendaal (b.1980) has long engaged with the language of digital abstraction, known for his web-based pieces, immersive screen installations, and his synthesis of code, color, and perception. In his world, websites become canvases and domain names function as frames, shaped by interface-driven, networked conditions. While his compositions—often algorithmic, generative, or infinite—merge technical precision with sensory immediacy, he reduces visual elements to diagrammatic structures and vivid fields of color. In doing so, he continues the lineage of artists who explore abstraction to reframe realities through systems and intuition.

 

In parallel with his digital works, Rafaël Rozendaal has also produced a diverse range of media characterized by tactile textures and materiality, such as Abstract Browsing—jacquard-woven tapestries evoking geometric abstractions, and Into Time—lenticular works where digital images are cut into fine strips and rearranged. Titled Details, this exhibition introduces his new series of paintings titled Manual, entirely created by hand. Unlike some of his earlier series, which relied on collaboration with coders, fabricators, or algorithms, these paintings are made directly by the artist in his studio using acrylic paint, rollers, and canvas. Thin washes of paint are layered and rolled in a methodical manner, replacing the pixel’s clinical precision with surface variability. The series moves between flatness and spatial suggestion, anchored in consistently cool tones, which lend each form a sense of suspension and quiet fluctuation. His compositions—minimal, diagrammatic, and open-ended—echo the logic of his web-based abstraction, but now speak through subtle hues, opacity, texture, and surface modulation. In Manual, his exploration slows into sensation, allowing materiality to hold space for perception.

 

The work invites a dialogue with multiple lineages. The compositions recall the constructive clarity of De Stijl, particularly Theo van Doesburg’s shift from static harmony to dynamic balance in his “elementarism”. These works, both structural and intuitive, engage with formalism while inherently softening its rigidity. Rozendaal’s “minimal figuration” suggests a quiet resonance with Agnes Martin’s search for form without image, and emotion without expression. In this series, his abstraction with procedural emphasis, free from narrative, is manifested not through code but through manual repetitive work, while showing an affinity with generative art. His use of everyday motifs reduced to essential outlines also aligns with Michael Krebber’s inquiries into “non-expressivity,” and Agnes Martin’s meditative seriality. Though the mediums have changed—from hex code to hand-mixed hues—Rozendaal’s work remains driven by systems of reduction, spatial equivalence, and a fascination with perceptual behavior. Rozendaal’s formal instincts are shaped as much by painterly tradition as by aesthetics of digital architecture.

 

In Details, UI structures breathe again within the space of painting. Their language, once optimized digitally, returns in painterly form—modular, tactile, and deliberate. The paintings reframe familiar geometries as echoes of a larger visual history, aligning with presence. What begins as a system yields to sensation, where calibrated forms hover between historical resonances and immediacy. It is here that abstraction absorbs memory, and structure begins to feel like intuition. A diagram opens into a landscape of perception.

 

Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

 

 

 

Rafaël Rozendaal

 

A pioneer of the net art scene, Rozendaal (b. 1980) is a Dutch-Brazilian artist who uses the internet as both his studio and his canvas. While he initially gained global prominence from his websites, Rozendaal has creatively utilized the internet—“the universal library”—to transcend these digital works into the physical world, be it his lenticular paintings, tapestries, and web installations.
In 2018, Rozendaal held his first solo museum exhibition GENEROSITY at Towada Art Center in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Other recent major exhibitions include, among others, The Museum of Modern Art　[MoMA], New York (USA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (USA), Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), Dordrechts Museum (NL), Kunsthal Rotterdam (NL), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA).
Publications include Home Alone (Three Star Books) and Everything, Always, Everywhere (Valiz).

 

 

 

[Exhibition Details]

 

Rafaël Rozendaal | Details

 

Exhibition Period: Saturday, July 26, 2025 – Saturday, September 6, 2025
Summer Holiday: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 – Saturday, August 16, 2025
Open: Tue-Sat, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Closed: Sun, Mon and National Holidays
Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
TSCA 3F TERRADA Art Complex I 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa Shinagawa-ku Tokyo
140-0002 Japan
tel 03-6712-9887 ｜fax 03-4578-0318 ｜e-mail gallery@tsca.jp