Tape and adhesive plastic foil of all sorts and sizes – shiny, matt, transparent and in a wide variety of colours. Jochem Rotteveel explores all possibilities within the limitations that he sets for himself by his choice of materials. ‘There is room in restriction. Once you realize that, you can explore it to the full. There is a starting point, and after that everything is allowed.’
His work has become increasingly minimalistic in recent years. Rough experiments have given way to smaller interventions, with compositions that are quieter, sometimes even contemplative. ‘My work is now purely about formal research into material and colour.’ This is where it touches upon painting. Jochem says he takes a painter’s approach in his way of thinking and working and applies it to tape and foil. Naturally he cannot mix plastic foil like paints, but by pasting related shades next to each other or by adding transparent layers, he finds painterly solutions with the material.
By folding the foil intuitively so that it rises above the plane of the substrate and sticking it around the edges, he blurs the dividing line between two- and three-dimensionality. In a temporary mural that he has now created in the gallery, he reacts to the surrounding space and enlarges the field of tension between flat surface and spatiality once more. The mural asks us questions: What is the image and what is the substrate? Where does the image stop: at the edges, at the back? Jochem plays in this way with unwritten rules about how we think we should look at art.