Robert van Bolderick was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1968 and is of both Swedish and Dutch descent.
Grew up in Stockholm and from age eleven in Las Palmas de Grand Canarias, Spain. Growing up in the pulse of a cosmopolitan city like Las Palmas and its mix of nationalities gave Robert an early interest in various languages and symbols which he uses in his art today. He is focused mostly on mixed media, combining acrylic, oil and tempera with the praxis of collage. This unique combination gives life to his art by expressing dreamlike and vibrant scenarios. Rhythm, pattern and balance are important, while images and text fragments are prominent but do not give the viewer all the information. His art captures the essence of dreams and memories which are fragmented and provide only a glimpse of what happened. Robert will often create an image in which the meanings of the adjacent symbols change, using hieroglyphs and cave paintings along with modern symbols, old family pictures, notes, recent events, or historical extracts in text and images. The familiar imagery loses its inherent symbolic value and becomes part of a new image. Robert currently lives and works between France and Sweden.
My paintings are eclectic and symbolic. I play with elusive notions of memories and dreams, placing remnants of personal notes, poems, and photos amongst writing and recognisable images from recent and past events. This plethora of imagery takes on new meaning and symbolism when combined on one canvas. I use mixed technique to my practice to breathe life and vibrancy into collaged surfaces with acrylic, oil, ink, charcoal, and tempera. These fragmented images and texts emerge hazily from the paintings, giving you flashes of meaning but not divulging too much. My work is about finding a balance in this patterned and rhythmic combination of collage and paint.
My work is an interpretation of the differences between history and memory. How we are changing the memories every time we think about them, and how we recognize images and remember events, and how other people’s memories are different from your own. Memory refers to the ways in which individuals and societies choose to remember or forget certain moments and events in their history. With the use of collage and paint I am interested in creating a compelling work of abstract art with recognisable elements that engages the viewer, is endlessly absorbing and promotes a meaningful dialogue, putting the viewer in an atmosphere of remembering. Where the images can be seen as decorative, but also give an interest to move closer to see more details. I want the viewers to maybe recognize personal memories in my paintings
Expertise:
“Creativity, style and choice of color, minimal but very strong.”
Melissa Colangelo, Artmeet Gallery
“Conveys a sense of authenticity, documenting the lives and our footprint through time. This has happened, mixed with a dreamy, ethereal world. It is an art that concern.”
Irene, Gallery Studio Four Seasons
“Robert van Bolderick is an artist of Dutch and Swedish origin. By using a mixed technique that combines acrylic, oil, gauche, to the praxis of collage, Van Bolderick gives life to artworks with dreamlike and vibrant scenarios that imprison on the canvas tracks of the real and of metaphorical evocations. Newspaper clippings, fragments of images, emerge with difficulty from the complex circuit of transversal meanings, blocked and trapped by the intense and enveloping chromatics that confers restless sonorities. The paintings on display may appear to refer to a typically Dadaist aesthetics of the case, but at the same time they’re purged of the Dada polemic force and iconoclastic fury. In fact, in the artist’s paintings colour, cut-outs, symbols of a mysterious past, like of the present, slowly emerge on the surface in a continuum of summons and recovery, composing and compressing themselves into new formal structures capable of returning the memory of reasons and feelings, and emotionally closer to the Rauschenberg’s memory palimpsest.”
Virginia Bazzechi Ganucci Cancellieri, Art critic
