The installation in the Garden Lobby projects geometric shapes in bright, essential color
It is easy to talk about abstraction: numerical proportions alluding to the harmony of the spheres, immutable and intangible Platonic ideas, the I Ching, and Leibniz’s binary system in which he hoped his metaphor of divine creation (one) from nothing (zero) would convince the Chinese of the excellence of the Christian faith; and again, the axiomatic systems of Hilbert and the logical formalists or Turing’s purely mental machine. Most of the time, abstraction is associated with eternal truths, exact and stable foundations whose status depends on their unchanging nature and lack of contradiction. After all, even the old Parmenidean dilemma never changes: how can what is become something else? Especially when it comes to laws: no one would be pleased if the universal gravitational constant changed while flying in an airplane.
One of the most interesting aspects of his artistic production is understanding the transformative internet potential
One of the most interesting aspects of Rafaël Rozendaal's artistic work is his understanding of the potential for change that the internet could offer to art. And so, here we have digital abstraction: following in the footsteps of artists like Joseph Albers and Ellsworth Kelly, who explored geometric abstraction and color, Rozendaal begins with a process of formal simplification of reality through drawing, which leads to agitation, movement, and the change of the abstract through algorithms.
The Light installation can be viewed equally on a computer screen or on the museum’s nearly eight-meter-high display
In the case of installations like Light, open until fall of 2025 in the Garden Lobby of MoMA, the result is screens crossed by simple geometric shapes made up of bright and essential colors, which can be viewed equally well on a computer screen or on the nearly eight-meter-high screen at the museum. The projections are taken from the artist’s website, which might be their ideal space: they are elemental forms created with the internet in mind and their potential for infinite circulation.
It is precisely this mobility, in contrast to the supposed stability that has long been considered the destiny of abstraction, that keeps alive the dialectic between the ephemeral and the continuous in Rozendaal's works: light, color and lightness, almost like a cartoon. After all, one of the leading figures of 20th-century abstraction, Mondrian, was obsessed with Disney's Snow White. Mickey Mouse in place of God, the algorithm in place of the axiom: no more logical foundations, goodbye gravitas. Codes and instructions, an abstract machine, more or less intelligent and everywhere: a machine that does something, now and forever: it plays.
Rafaël Rozendaal
Light
New York
MoMA
A cura di/curated by
Paola Antonelli
Amanda Forment
Fino/until
Autunno/autumn 2025
