Kodama Kanazawa (Independent Curator)　金澤 韻（インディペンデント・キュレーター）

When I heard from Rafaël Rozendaal that he had begun renting a studio to paint, I assumed it was as a hobby or experiment. After all, to me he had always been an “Internet artist,” a quality that gave his work an appeal distinct from that of other artists. Since the early 2010s, I’ve collaborated with Rozendaal many times, engaging in numerous dialogues with him and reflecting on his work. I’ll never forget the impact of seeing one of his website works for the first time. A field that expanded infinitely. Images welling up as though from a spring, recursive yet never revealing the same thing twice. His work always brought new discoveries and a meditative calm, like I would be content simply to gaze at them forever. I loved that world of imagination made possible by the space of the Internet and Rozendaal’s belief that the screens we look at every day could hold a beauty akin to what we find in nature.

Of course, I am aware that Rozendaal also makes physical works. His lenticulars, which slice and rearrange the digital images that compose his websites, can be described as physical GIFs. Meanwhile, the tapestry series Abstract Browsing abstracts the user interfaces of familiar websites like Yahoo through the medium of jacquard weaving. Other works include those made with enamel and mirror. Nonetheless, consistent across them all is the process of outputting physical motifs taken from the structures of the web and UI, and for this, they never seemed to stray far from the identity of an “Internet artist.”

And yet—Details, the artist’s most recent show at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, was a show of paintings. The works in the series Manual are all, as suggested by its title, created by Rozendaal’s own hand. His process is as follows. First, he meticulously selects his colors by mixing acrylic paints and making tests on paper. Then, using masking tape, he painstakingly maps out the section for a specific color onto the canvas. The paint is applied using a roller. When a section is dry, he rearranges the masking tape to mark the next section and lays down another color. The composition and colors are determined before his hands ever touch the canvas; in Rozendaal’s Manual series, the kind of tactile struggle with paint that we so often imagine of painters is nowhere to be found.

I was told that the exhibition title, Details, was a reference to the subtle tonal differences to which the artist was intensely attuned as he selected colors—but to me, it also seems to reflect his attitude toward the entire process of creating the Manual paintings. The ever-so-slight buildup of paint where one color field borders another speaks to the delicacy of his handiwork. The roller, chosen by Rozendaal after much experimentation with other tools, leaves behind a subtle unevenness that lends the surface an exquisite shimmer. What is depicted are spaces, scenes, and envelopes—the icon for email—yet the radical simplicity of the color compositions gives off a decisively abstract impression; as I look, not so much at the depicted objects but at the painting’s surface itself, I am quietly drawn in by the remarkable resonance between barely distinguishable colors. The paintings hold their own so firmly that, if I didn’t know Rozendaal, I’d believe them to be the work of an “up-and-coming painter.”

As I wrote in the beginning, I never imagined that Rozendaal would turn to paint and canvas. What could it mean? In Japan, for instance, there was Tadanori Yokoo, an artist who declared a “turn” from graphic design to painting. Was Rozendaal making a similar kind of pivot?

A bridge comes to mind in his haiku works. It would seem that the haiku works, begun in 2013, are also a far cry from Internet art. Yet Rozendaal was fascinated by the ability of this literary form to evoke rich imagery with just a few carefully chosen words. He began writing haiku in English and has since published two volumes. The haiku reminds him, he says, of code—short commands that perform complex functions. These haiku works have been exhibited in various spaces, including museums, as a kind of wall painting. The colors used in these instances are determined by Rozendaal from the paints of a specific paint maker; the proportions of the mural are also decided by the artist. In this process, I sense a resonance with that of the Manual series.

Looking back, I remember Rozendaal previously describing his website works as “moving paintings.” In other words, perhaps he’s been making paintings all along. Paintings, or something close to painting. That “something” follows certain rules, rules that Rozendaal has continually explored, governing the way colors, shapes, compositions, and motion can move people. Whether expressed through a screen, haiku, or canvas, this exploration has remained consistent. Yet that they reflect a sensibility nurtured by the Internet age is also evident. If the lenticular is a “physical GIF” and the haiku “literary code,” then perhaps his paintings are a kind of “slow algorithm.”

What makes Manual particularly compelling is how Rozendaal’s translation of his art into painting deepens its dialogue with the history of art. The artists of Abstract Expressionism, for instance, once sought to engage viewers’ emotions directly through color fields and scale, bypassing representation. This approach overlaps with that of Rozendaal, whose work evokes vibrant scenes through elements reduced to their barest. When these pursuits, previously carried out in the digital realm, are brought into the “stillness” of painting, their abstraction and simplicity are further heightened. In this sense, Manual can be seen as a kind of Abstract Expressionism re-emerging a century later, in the digital/Internet age.

When viewed individually, the clarity of composition and sensibility in color of Rozendaal’s paintings recall De Stijl, rooted in the artist’s Dutch heritage, while among the Abstract Expressionists, Sol LeWitt, the pioneer of instruction-based painting, comes to mind. There is also a dialogue with Agnes Martin, whose delicate marks and subtle colors create deeply meditative paintings, while the motif of the mail icon evokes the American flag paintings of Jasper Johns, not to mention the connection to Josef Albers’ study of the effects of color, and so on… I would love to hear a specialist in painting continue the list.

In this way, Rozendaal—both a descendant of this long lineage of painterly practice and an explorer of beauty in the digital age—continues the pursuit of fundamental artistic questions. I hope to continue witnessing the depths of art his wide-ranging practice opens up.

Translation by Eriko Ikeda Kay

Yoh Shoji (Curator, Pola Museum of Art)　東海林洋（ポーラ美術館 学芸員）

Lining the gallery wall are several envelopes—or rather, tableaux in the shape of envelopes. They are a new series by Rafaël Rozendaal, an artist known primarily for works that make use of the Internet and coding. Their scale is far too large for actual envelopes; it would be more accurate to say that the form of the envelope has been stretched to the kind of dimensions commonly associated with paintings shown in galleries. Looking closely, I can make out subtle ridges of pigment that recall the origami-esque properties that are produced when folding a sheet of paper. Standing before these works, I find myself asking, anachronistic human that I am, whether I can truly consider this series to be painting. After all, Western painting since the Renaissance has largely been driven by the premise of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, assigning meaning to the figures and motifs placed within it. Even when Paul Cezanne sought to challenge such spatial integration, the assumption of depth nonetheless persisted in painting. Abstract Expressionism’s rejection of depth was a reaction against this tradition; by eliminating space and reference altogether, it strove to return painting to pure color and materiality and produce autonomous works. Rozendaal’s envelope series, however, does not recreate envelopes within a three-dimensional pictorial space; instead, it simply overlaps the shape of an envelope onto the rectangular display surface that is painting. Compared to his earlier digital works driven by dynamic algorithms or his lenticular works that change color depending on the viewer’s position, this series appears strikingly concrete and static.

If we were to seek a precedent in modern painting that addressed a similar question, we might recall the structure of the tableau-objet, which emerged from the collages introduced by Picasso and Braque in 1912 as a way to break out of the increasing complexity of Analytic Cubism. In defiance of the rule that painting must reproduce a subject through strokes of the brush, they began pasting materials like newspapers and fabric directly onto their surfaces. By allowing real objects to appear within what had previously functioned as a device for representing space, they acquired a new mode of expression based on the presentation of physical material.

Cubist collage was an attempt to superimpose “that which is represented (depiction)” and “that which is presented (physical material)” within a single field. This relationship can also be understood through the mathematical concept of isomorphism, which refers to systems that share a structural correspondence even when their constituent elements differ. Transposed into the context of art, isomorphism might describe a situation in which representation and physical presence—or material and meaning—coexist according to the same structural logic within a painting.

This visualization of the isomorphic relationship between representation and presence is what defines the tableau-objet. Originating in Cubism, this concept was carried forward by various strands of twentieth-century art: from the emphasis on materiality in the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, to the conceptual orientation of the Supports/Surfaces movement, which approached painting as a social and institutional structure. Jasper Johns’s Flag (1954–55), which presents the American flag as a physical object on the rectangular canvas, and Robert Rauschenberg’s transformation of everyday objects into works of art by attaching them to a surface, likewise emerged from this lineage.

Rozendaal’s envelope paintings, however, do not merely reenact these twentieth-century forms. Whereas Picasso’s collages took as their motifs various objects atop the table, and Johns’s flag served as a social symbol of the nation-state, the envelope of Rozendaal’s choosing is a tool for enclosing and transmitting meaning and information; in other words, it lacks any specific object of reference. As a medium, a letter is reducible to neither meaning (signifié) nor form (signifiant), instead functioning as a physical vehicle for signs. Moreover, on the Internet, where Rozendaal has long operated, the envelope is also the icon for e-mail, a symbol of communication itself. By this point, painting no longer exists simply as an object to be viewed but rather establishes itself as a “site,” released from materiality, where information is exchanged. For this reason, Rozendaal’s envelope paintings are not so much an example of the tableau-objet as they are a kind of “tableau-interface,” mediating the structures of communication. While an envelope and a tableau are formally isomorphic in their shared rectangular shape, their functions in the fluctuating realm of digital communication differ—and it is this dissonance that opens onto a generative, transformative relationship that transcends fixed correspondence.

If painting is an artistic apparatus for representation, the envelope is an intermediary tool for communication. For a historical example of an artist who similarly made this structural correspondence the subject of his work, Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, active in seventeenth-century Flanders, comes to mind. A masterful painter of tromp-l’oeil, Gijsbrechts pushed illusion to its extreme, making two-dimensional paintings appear three-dimensional through meticulous detail and exquisite use of shadow. Yet his work did not simply culminate in realism. By deliberately inserting clues, or meta-elements, that reveal the image to be exactly that—a painting—he estranged the pictorial space itself. Among the motifs he repeatedly employed, he was particularly fond of the letter, a device that mediates between the painting’s inside and outside.

In The Self-Aware Image (1993), Victor Stoichita addresses the significance of the letter motif, writing that Gijsbrechts’s tromp-l’œil paintings were not merely feats of optical trickery but attempts to reproduce the institution of painting itself. Stoichita draws particular attention to motifs such as envelopes, scraps of paper, and wooden boards, all of which mimic the basic components of painting—surface, support, frame—to create a nested structure: a painting within a painting. Letters arriving from elsewhere or papers pinned to the wall register traces of communication with the outside world while also emphasizing the flatness of paper as a material object and alluding to the existence of an underlying support. Gijsbrechts’s painted letters thus function both as records of communication and as devices that reproduce the structure of painting, collapsing into a single artwork the mediation of meaning and the self-reflexive exposure of painting’s institutional conditions.

Rozendaal’s envelopes, however, are no longer physical letters. Like the digital icon for e-mail, they appear as symbolic images representing communication itself. The faint ridges and shadows that suggest folds hint at real envelopes while at the same time emphasizing the flatness characteristic of digital icons. Their shapes are stretched, even unnaturally so, to fit the conventions of painting and thereby acquire a painterly “legitimacy.” Once a small vessel for communication, the envelope is transformed within the exhibition space into a device that overlays two systems: the circulation of information and the exhibition of art.

Let us return, then, to my initial question: can these works be considered paintings? Rozendaal’s envelopes borrow the institutional framework of painting while making visible the act of communication. In other words, through the mediating structure of the tableau, they operate as interfaces that move between material painting and immaterial communication. The envelope is no longer a container for messages but rather a zone of interaction where information and sensation come and go. Just as the surface of traditional painting functioned as a representational apparatus that both separated and connected reality and illusion, Rozendaal’s envelope paintings, with their postal and electronic ambivalence, establish a site of relation: an empty vehicle. In doing so, they quietly transcend the tableau-objet to become a tableau-interface and, in the process, update the very definition of painting.

Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Tromp l’oeil. Board Partition with Letter Rack and Music Book, 1668, National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), https://open.smk.dk/en/artwork/image/KMS3059, CC0

Translation by Eriko Ikeda Kay