You are in my Rotterdam, welcome
oil on linen 150×300 cm, 2021-2022
De E.T. die ik als model heb gekozen is een speelgoedpoppetje dat ik heb gevonden op een populaire markt in Buenos Aires. Het is een object gemaakt van erg goedkoop plastic, en klein in formaat, maar het behoudt al zijn visuele kracht als het wordt vergroot. Het is een iconisch figuur in de wereld van de cinema en wordt gepresenteerd op het plein voor Rotterdam Centraal, een station van internationaal belang. De futuristische sfeer van de architectuur van Rotterdam Centraal maakt het de perfecte omgeving voor een gigantische sculptuur die daar geschilderd zal worden, maar omdat het fictie is zal het eerder lijken op bijvoorbeeld “Pokémon Go”, een vorm van AR (augmented reality). Een echt object in een echte omgeving, geschilderd op een hyperrealistische manier.
This project is made possible by Makersloket/ Droom en Daad / Rotterdam
Gewoon, Gezellig, Surrealistisch #2 | Eendrachtsplein
Oil on canvas, 155 × 200 cm, 2020
This painting is based on a familiar location in Rotterdam: Eendrachtsplein. The scene is real, except for a single element. At the center of the square, I replaced Paul McCarthy’s iconic Santa Claus sculpture—popularly known as the Buttplug Gnome and acquired by the municipality for a considerable sum—with a modest €3 garden gnome.
This small displacement completely transforms the reading of the landscape. The ordinary becomes uncanny, and the boundary between document and fiction begins to blur. The painting is part of a series of intervened urban landscapes, in which I introduce improbable elements as though they had escaped from a video game or existed as layers of augmented reality—a kind of urban Pokémon that exists only within the painting.
As an extension of the project, I uploaded a photograph of the painting to Google Maps, inserting it among the real images of the site. The gesture seeks to infiltrate the city’s digital archive and introduce a moment of uncertainty for anyone encountering the location through a screen. For an instant, the viewer is left wondering whether they have remembered the place incorrectly, or whether the city itself has actually changed.
In the middle of 2018 while riding my bike through Rotterdam, I saw the image of a guy standing and dressed in black, with glasses and two packages of family-size toilet paper hanging from his arms. Just then, three words in Dutch were hovering in my head that together sound absurd: “Gewoon, Gezellig, Surrealistisch”. And the joke came, a short story and then a possible “method” (thinking of Dalí) to create images from these three words. In April 2019 and in an attempt to represent that image, I went around the city with the toilet packages in search of the real situation of what I had seen. In February 2020 I started painting this small format panel. By March the pandemic came, and among the first news it jumped out that toilet paper was running out in the world, becoming the star product of Covid-19. There were not many explanations of the subject, neither had my digital image obtained and the painting started and based on this photograph. Mine had nothing to do with the FOMO (fear of missing out) or the “mass hysteria” effect that was being talked about at that time. It was then that I decided to stop painting and leave the image “ruminating”. Today I finished the painting. 31-12-2021
ENRIQUE COLLAR 