Willem de Rooij at KW

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Attempts to discern is handed a blue screen to infer what in "Whiteout—a selection of de Rooij’s production from the last twenty years" is happening.  This feeling we have at such attempts, of confusion, of being at a loss, is strange to us since art generally works to be so visibly, pornographically there. But it's the power of the known artist to withold, give us the promotional still as FOMO shield: that we are unable to judge but know happened and we missed out.





See too: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium and Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

AR: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

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Originally Posted: September 23rd, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

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Like Cage, for whom silence released a flood of sound, for de Rooij from the magistration of blankness comes an outpouring of reference. Cognition loathes a vacuum and in noise organizes pattern and meaning. Finds pleasure in such sterility totemized. De Rooij's is the cold grammar of industry.


See too, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, David Lieske at MUMOK

Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

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Every bouquet is the package of “nature’s” beauty amped to steroidic artificiality by its mechanization under Capital’s fuel. Beauty produced by destroying natural significance given over to its industrialization. Flowers no longer natural rarities of amazing sensuality but disposable and instantaneous orgies. Of which De Rooij’s 95 variety bouquet is its endgame, numbers governing the bottom line (95 of any variety) over attunement to any individual heterogeneity of genus, species, taste, knowledge or sensitivity. It is to flowers what the frenzied visible of pornography is to sex; the natural giving way to industrial significance. Like 2.5 years of “Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration” photographs, in their accumulation they speak not to individual situations but, through their ordering, instead render how a culture itself chooses to visualize and represent and thus define its concepts, and de Rooij within that, artificially cold, useful only for what can be conceptually extracted (produced) from it, by say a writer.