TRYING TO MAKE IT REAL - PART I & II

By bringing together many years of work in one place, here on the page, rather than on the walls of a museum or gallery, we can Consider the two senses in which Roels thinks images are worth worth repeating. In the stubborn and dedicated work of printing and of arranging serial, but different, versions of unique images; and then also regarding the overall effect of bringing these iterations of themselves together in the same space. But there is another sense in which we could find that Roels' work resonates not only with himself, but also with those who preceded him; and this, amusingly enough, is in his refusal to take oneself, or one's work, too seriously. Just enough seriously, it seems, to invest time, effort and skills in producing his complex and subtly nuanced works, but never to the point that, like Ruscha before him (the artist who made Various Small Fires and Milk), he finds himself unable to resist the constraints of its own logic and, more importantly, to play with them. A little like Dalí, perhaps, who, captivated by the potential of photography to document and catalogue the world, was also certain that this same ability would result in us never being able to see anything again it is the same way. From "the subtlety of aquariums", as Dalí said himself, "to the most rapid and fleeting gestures of wild animals, Photography offers us a thousand fragmentary images that culminate in a dramatized cognitive totalization." This too is worth repeating. -Simon Baker