FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424 Fax. (310) 276-7430
de Rijke / de Rooij
October 26 - November 24, 2001
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-5 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, October 26th 6-8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to announce the premiere Los Angeles exhibition by Dutch artists, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij. This exhibition will feature a 35mm film titled, Bantar Gebang, and a video, Junks.
Bantar Gebang is a ten-minute film which consists of a single static view of a shanty town built on a vast rubbish dump near Jakarta. The film begins with the sky still dark just before dawn. The light gradually shifts throughout the film until daylight begins to shine over the settlement. At the center of the frame is the entrance to the walled shanty town. At times the still image is animated only by a group of fluttering doves. Occasionally a figure walks by in the foreground. The structure of the image is revealed as the light shifts from dreamy twilight to breaking day.
Junks is a twenty minute video shot in Amsterdam's red-light district. In a dark narrow alley filled with passersby, the artists asked junkies to pose before the camera for a few minutes in exchange for a beer. The film consists of six portraits captured in this manner; some of the subjects are immigrants and some are Dutch. Each junkie was instructed to stand still and look straight into the camera for the duration of the filming.
Creating a tension between the two dimensional tableau and the element of time inherent in film, de Rijke / de Rooij create discrete visual moments with a defined beginning and end. They employ the formal rigor of painterly compositions to examine the idea of the exotic - or the subject which exists only by way of its dislocation. As in the perspectival paintings of the Renaissance, the grid can be felt under their quiet compositions. De Rijke / de Rooij create moments of pause around images of what have come to communicate the idea of such iconic subjects as beauty and love, or the pastoral versus the constructions of man.
"All de Rijke / de Rooij's films are set somewhere beyond quotidian reality. They choose locations that represent a particular fantasy or mental picture. ... recall[ing] pictures that you may have seen before in a museum or glimpsed in the cinema. Their work distills, rather than consumes, a world of pre-existing visual information, observing fiction with superb and deliberate detail. ... de Rijke / de Rooij concern themselves with visual gratification. The highly mannered style of their films liberates the image from being anything other than a grand celluloid moment." (Dale McFarland. Being There. Frieze. Jan./Feb. 2001. pp. 91-93)
Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij live and work in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; the Kunsthaus Glarus; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; and the Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach. Monographs include Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij: After the Hunt published by Lukas & Sternberg, New York for the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and de Rijke / de Rooij: Director's Cut published by The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo.
An opening reception for de Rijke / de Rooij will take place at the gallery on Friday, October 26th from 6-8 pm. For further information, please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at 310-276-5424.