Next exhibition of José Ramón Amondarain in GABRIEL ROLT gallery in Amsterdam. The opening will be next saturday 12th of january.

Galerie Gabriel Rolt presents the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of paintings and works on paper by Spanish-Basque artist José Ramón Amondarain (1964), from 12 January to 16 February. Amondarain is preoccupied with how a painting can represent reality while being simultaneously tied to the point of view of the artist and the observer.

His work is a dialogue between painting and photography: two disciplines that have increasingly overlapped in recent years since the latter’s christening as an independent art form. His recent work has shifted from painted copies of existing photographs, such as a photograph of Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall or Nan Goldin, with whom he ‘’collaborates’’ from his point of view, towards portraits of artists and details of existing art works, such as a framed painting of Van Gogh. He also uses his own photographs, such as a photo of his daughter, or images from the Internet that challenge him as a painter.

Amondarain is a painter pur sang. If one delves more deeply into his oeuvre it becomes apparent that his theme is not copying existing work: rather, this is his medium. One of his paintings shows an art student in the Louvre positioned with his easel in front of a painting which he is copying. The artist is bent forward and a little out of focus. The painting is clearly based on a photograph - but the picture of the painting on the wall and the copy on the easel are the same. The hyper-realism in his technique and visual language, which is reminiscent of Hopper, only compounds the viewer’s confusion. The reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction takes us into a Platonic discourse: Plato stated that the world we live in is only a faint reflection of reality