Jochem Rotteveel explores all the possibilities that lie within the limitations he imposes on himself through his choice of materials. ‘There is space within restriction. If you break that boundary, you can reach into the depths. There is a starting point, after which anything goes.’
His work has become increasingly minimalistic over the last few years. Rough experiments have given way to smaller interventions, and his compositions have become quieter, sometimes even introspective. ‘Nowadays my work is purely a formal examination of material and colour’. In this respect it is similar to painting. Rotteveel says that he takes the same approach as a painter would in his way of thinking and working, and applies this to tape and foil. Although plastic cannot be mixed like paint, he creates paint-like solutions with the material by pasting similar colours adjacently or adding transparent layers of colour.
By folding the foil intuitively, allowing it to reach beyond the plane of the substrate, and by changing the angle, he blurs the dividing line between two and three dimensionality. In a temporary mural, created in the gallery itself, he responds to the spaces surrounding him, again increasing the field of tension between plane and spatiality. His work asks us questions: What is the image and what is the substrate? Where does the image stop? At the edges? At the back? In this way, Rotteveel plays with the unwritten rules that dictate how we think we should look at art.
This text is partly inspired by the text written by Merel van den Nieuwenhoef, commissioned by Galerie Bart.