In his first solo exhibition since graduating from Frankfurt Städelschule last year, Amsterdam-based painter W. Rossen presents five new works. Although compact, the show is rich in art historical references. “Ostend”, the title of the exhibition, refers both to the name of the district of Frankfurt where he lived and to the birthplace of one of his inspirations, James Ensor. Åsgårdstrand, a Norwegian town depicted by Edvard Munch in 1902. For Åsgårdstrand (all works 2022), Rossen copied this last image, adding two important twists: he rendered the background elements as white bumps, so that objects can only be recognized by shadows they project, and he erased Munch’s human figures, instead populating the foreground with gnomic, inanimate objects, like a camera with weird levers.
This last choice is crucial given the economy of the exhibition; Rossen seems to send the message that people aren’t that important, at least not in his paintings. When human figures appear, they are depicted as dolls, subject to sculpture, in the case of Handen, Kameror suspended from the ceiling, in that of trianon– or they are overshadowed by technology (see the imposing camera that obscures a character’s face in After Engewormer). Recalling Duchamp coffee grinder in their mysterious inner workings, their strange presences and their symbolic weight, Rossen’s mechanical tools are the true protagonists of his paintings. The most fascinating of these is the broken but functional wheel, a quote from a 17th century painting by Jan van Goyen, landscape with an oak treewhich appears both in Rossen Dewormer And Åsgårdstrand.
