Vittorio Roerade – Sculptures & Paintings – The Netherlands
Vittorio works and lives in The Hague. 1984-1989 Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Plastic Arts) in the Hague. In his paintings he uses unorthodox techniques and materials to create a fairytale-like atmosphere.
He combines bee wax with photo collages, he casts epoxy, he perforates his work and provides it with hair and embroidery.
His moving and alienating material paintings mostly breath both the vulnerability of mankind and the interconnection of everything on earth. Even though all his work arises from minute drawings in little sketch books, Roerade, above all, is active as a painter. Initiately he made oil-paintings and watercolors, but soon enough he introduces collage elements within. His choice of subjects has always remained the same : the human being, human relationships and how the individual compares to the great altogether.
The portrait has an important roll as a mirror to the world and as an exponent of psychological meanings . Striking in his early work are the series in which Roerade repeats certain parts of the human body, like noses, eyes, hands and feet thus creating various special effects. The elements become mysterious and change into a pattern, but they can also make an amalgamated human outof a double portrait. But also it occurs that in portraits nose and mouth are missing causing the impression that they seem to be concentrated on or cut -off from the world.
Another fascination, the one for structures, appears in his more recent work. What in his early work appeared as a close-up of a hand, exposing the lines of the skin, nowadays branches and spiderwebs perform an independent motif.
It won’t be a pure formal interest, for Roerade it’s about a system of connections between individuals and about an ultimate fundamental structure of which all matter is built. The universe in a playful and poetic form. He adds text and lyrics from pop songs about love and the beauty of existence. These lyrics he built from little dots, that are drilled into the epoxy resin, form an abstract pattern that lies over the performance like a star-spangeld sky.
In his most recent paintings he continues the mixture of individual and network while allowing ever more freedom to the performance.