OPENING 5 SEPTEMBER: 17.00 - 19.30HRS

Upstream Gallery presents Books, a new exhibition of paintings by Rafaël Rozendaal. 

Books comprises a series of diptychs pairing monochrome canvases in muted pastel tones, framed together like an open book: pages blank, waiting to be filled, the way Rozendaal begins each day with an empty page in his sketchbook, or an empty browser window.

Rozendaal’s visual language hovers at the edge of figuration and abstraction: how few lines, how few colours, are needed before an image becomes recognisable? Built up in layers of thinned acrylic, his paintings show simplified landscapes and objects, reduced to a diagram and colour fields, the same economy of means that defines his animations and digital works. A recurring motif is the horizon: a horizontal line, two colours, suddenly forming a landscape. In Books, he turns to the vertical instead, the line that makes two abstract monochromes figurative.

This minimal figuration runs through the practice of the artist, who is best known for his internet work, but who doesn’t confine himself to a single medium. His work is marked by a drive towards reduction, a stripping away of information, the same instinct that for years kept him without a studio or storage space. Even his exhibition on MoMA's digital wall held to this logic: 25 works together amounted to no more than 135KB of data.

The paintings arrive at a moment of image inflation, when generated pictures multiply faster than anyone can look at them and stimulation has become an ambient condition rather than an event. Absence, for Rozendaal, is not a lack but an opening: the blank page as unclaimed territory, an opportunity to create. In his words: "In an attention economy, focus is the ultimate luxury."