Paintings gaze quizzically at the viewer; sculptures study the paintings.

The idea for the current exhibition came when taking a closer look at the work of Roy Mordechay* and Frans Roermond**. One thing the two artists have in common in that they are both deeply influenced by artworks well beyond their immediate purview. In Mordechay’s case it is art objects of antiquity, both within his native Israel and those with historical significance for the country. For Roermond it is the highly charged Melanesian cult figures that he studied in-depth over a long period. The key interest in both cases is in exploring the cultural history of humankind, the roots of our aesthetic and creative capabilities and the related cultural environments.

Mordechay’s aquarelles are powerful, the totem-like heads and faces take on a life of their own as a tribe of intense, emotional characters. They are dark without being sinister, drawing the viewer in with an almost magical allure. They thus correspond well with the paintings of Frans Roermond, works mainly from 2014 that conclude a phase in which he investigated the extra-historical nature of the cultures of Papua New Guinea: masks as cultic objects; a house for men as a place of refuge; a fountain as the axis mundi.

All of this is bolstered by the presence of African and Oceanic sculptures with their enigmatic inner life, which they will reveal to the extent that one is able to approach them. At the very least they emit a palpable energy and concentration, creating a vibration that subtly permeates the entire space.

For works on loan we offer our sincere thanks to the collectors Dr. Hartmut and Dr. Maria Kraft, Susanne Hortig and Reinhold Buckenmayer.

*Roy Mordechay (born in 1976 in Haifa, Israel) studied from 1999 to 2002 at Avni Institut of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. He has been the recipient of many stipends, grants and awards, including the Israel Young Artist Prize, Ministry of Culture, the Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Art, and, in 2014, a grant from the Lepsien Art Foundation, which took him to Düsseldorf where he currently lives and works.

** Frans Roermond (born in 1967 as Franz van der Grinten) left his art studies at the HdK Berlin to pursue his own eclectic path of further education, including vocational training as a taxidermist, an ongoing exploration of Super8 film and photography and the practice of drawing and painting. He later exhibited in the framework of projects, in solo shows and group exhibitions with artist friends, activities that led to the establishment, in 1997, of a project space in the Ewaldistraße in Cologne. This would go on to become the Van der Grinten Galerie of today. It wasn’t until 2014 that van der Grinten resumed his own artistic production under the name Frans Roermond.

The exhibition unites 141 drawings and 9 paintings, the majority of the works created last year. The 141 original pencil drawings shown comprise a series that Roermond began in 2017, aiming to render the entirety of Samuel Beckett’s theatre piece ‘Play’ in this form. The drawings also provide the material for an “abstract graphic novel”, published in book form to accompany the exhibition.

Thomas Köster, in his opening essay, refers to the work as: ‘Play is not only an outstanding example of Beckett’s understanding of physical visibility expressed in speech (“Am I as much as…being seen?”), but also of the playwright’s visual approach to language: the rigid characters on the dimly lit stage, named only in shorthand (W1, W2, M), each staring straight ahead, speaking only and instantly when lit by a spotlight. For Beckett the spot acts as a silent interrogator, for the viewer perhaps also as the director, or God at the Last Judgment. In any case, the spot on /spot off provides the framework for the spoken word, as do the speech-bubbles in Roermond’s paintings, framing the visualized spoken words. In Play the spotlight becomes a fourth actor, steering the piece and setting the pace with its rhythmic “cuts”. Or, as Frans Roermond puts it: “The spotlight dispenses the words.” (…) Beckett’s Play is a binary piece that inhales the structuring ON of the spotlight (white) and exhales the OFF of the darkened stage (black). In this sense, the drawings of the Play series act as the negative, because the dark element (the line) tends to be more the purveyor of “meaning” than the light element (the paper). For Beckett the spotlight becomes the fourth performer; Roermond’s drawings do the same: a very modern use of material and abstraction.’

In the paintings, the speech-bubbles from earlier pictures can themselves now be seen as segments of infinite surface areas, becoming dots or holes in the skies that open up illusionistically to the viewers gaze.  They thus display a developing pictorial space that appears to expand infinitely into the foreground and background. The immateriality of the cloud formations creates the impression of an alluring force that pulls one into the depths of the image. Finally, the table-like sculpture that serves as the centerpiece of the show draws the focus to a sort of stage event in the form of something like a model, an element that seems at once simple and complex and does not readily reveal its secrets.

Frans Roermond was born in 1967 in Suriname and presently lives and works in New York City.