Vittorio Roerade: Painting the Fragile Threads That Connect Us

There's a particular kind of art that resists a single glance — you have to lean in, look closer, and even then you're not quite sure whether you're looking at a painting, a relic, or something that grew there on its own. That's the territory Dutch artist Vittorio Roerade has spent decades exploring.

Born in 1962, Roerade studied at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (the Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague between 1984 and 1989, and he still lives and works in the city today. Over the course of his career he's built a body of work substantial enough to earn a museum solo exhibition at GEM, featuring six years of his output, and his pieces have circulated through Dutch auction houses and galleries such as Galerie Ramakers in The Hague ever since.

What sets Roerade apart isn't just subject matter — it's material. He treats the canvas (or panel) less like a surface and more like a body to be worked on. Beeswax gets folded in alongside photo collage. Epoxy resin is poured and set. Surfaces are perforated, stitched, and embellished with hair and embroidery. The result is less "picture on a wall" and more a kind of skin — something that seems to have a physical stake in the emotions it depicts.

He starts, almost paradoxically, from the smallest possible gesture: countless minute drawings filling little sketchbooks. From there, everything scales up. Early in his career the work leaned toward oil painting and watercolor before collage elements crept in and never left.

Roerade's subject matter has stayed remarkably consistent even as his materials evolved: people, the relationships between them, and how a single individual fits into something much larger. The portrait, in particular, functions as a kind of psychological mirror throughout his work.

In his earlier pieces, he'd isolate and repeat specific body parts — a nose, an eye, a hand, a foot — until the repetition itself became strange. Doubled portraits sometimes fuse into a single, ambiguous figure; other times a mouth or nose is left out entirely, leaving a face that reads as both intensely focused and cut off from the world around it.

More recently, that fascination with the body has branched outward — quite literally. Branches and spiderwebs have become independent motifs in his work, standing in for something bigger than formal pattern-making: a visual argument that everything, from a single hand's lines to the structure of the universe itself, is built from the same underlying web of connections.

One of the more poetic details of Roerade's practice is how he handles text. He'll take lyrics from pop songs — lines about love, about the strange beauty of simply existing — and drill them into epoxy resin as tiny dots, so the words dissolve into an abstract pattern across the surface. From a distance it reads like a scattering of stars; only up close does the hidden sentence reveal itself. It's a fitting metaphor for the whole project: connection encoded into something you initially mistake for noise.

His more recent works, several from a series titled I measured infinity and it was precise, lean further into gold leaf, lacquer, and glitter on wood — smaller, jewel-like objects that carry the same cosmic ambitions as his larger material paintings, just condensed into a different scale entirely.

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