Joram Roukes is a Netherlands based artist, living and working in the city of Groningen.
His predominantly large scale oil paintings are reflections of everyday life situations, observed, filtered and reassembled in a collage like way. The resulted paintings pose a fragmented yet cohesive view on today’s society and human behaviour.
It is impossible to hastily pass by one of Joram Roukes’ striking canvases, as his arrestingly bright colours, skilled representations and experimental juxtapositions arouse immediate intrigue in any viewer. But it is more than just jarring images and stirring compositions that keep us lingering in front of his pieces. The distinct quality that transforms Joram’s work from ‘glance-worthy’ to ‘fascinating’ is perhaps best described by the indefinable tension present in every detail of his work.
Joram’s energetic canvases have an incredible liveliness that draws us into each surreal world that he constructs. In moments of great vigour and spontaneity, Joram’s brushwork recalls the intensity of the abstract expressionists’ emotive mark-making. In other areas, extreme control and meticulous attention is paid to familiar figurative representations tweaked with a surreal quirkiness. Joram’s capacity to seamlessly mix traditional techniques, urban influences, pop culture imagery and fantasy, displays a freedom that explores the full spectrum of what the medium of oil paint can accomplish. Blending graffiti roots with classically trained dexterity; Joram achieves a unique and inspired visual style with which he can communicate his many observations of the western world. Expertly combining high and low art, Joram’s portraits comment on contemporary culture, confronting viewers with our own untamed absurdity in an engaging narrative characterized by beauty, chaos and decay.
“When you paint a human face first of all your are portraying someone, a person that does exist. What I try to do in the works instead is to keep them anonymous, so it’s not about a person, not about an individual, but more about the generation and the society I’m trying to put across in the painting.
When you paint animals heads there are a lot of associations and relations with the human behaviour: animals can be dirty or sly for example. There are really a lot of behavioural things that can be associated with any sort of animals and together with the other imaginary in the painting, I think it’s a stronger way of complementing the story rather than using human faces.
So it’s a matter of anonymity, and also leaving lands for more associations.” – Joram Roukes (Renton’s Room)
