” The world that I paint, that I represent, gives me freedom to explore time. What I capture in my paintings serves as a chronicle in which human figure is a conductive thread. It is the reflection of my heritage” JD R

Jean-Daniel Rohrer`s paintings are like memory maps never caught up in a specific moment in time. Rohrer plays on the ambiguity of memory, and of history, or our collective memory.


These works allude to an unconscious, and this in a world where our memory has been disconnected from persona due to the way data – visual and verbal – are now gathered. And so it is rare to find an artist who reads significance into the vernacular of history, and uses the ephemera of popular culture and imagery from high art together in a single work.

These new painting by Jean-Daniel Rohrer are infused with the memory of things, of events, of experience, and as a memory filter, these paintings capture a sense of time. Instead of being purely symbolic, hieratic though the organization of elements within these paintings actually is, these works capture a sense of the texture of time, of the time in time. New contexts are given to old materials [as we] see an old newspaper, a reproduction of a Sandro Botticelli, a beautiful stencil of a butterfly, a photo portrait, a record player part, amid an array of abstracted symbols and signifiers. All these pictorial and representative elements are presented amid this abstract, vivid background of paint. It is as if the canvas were the tabula rasa onto which experience inscribes itself. Just as these images are neutralized, so they become visual symbols, metaphors for our collective, inter-cultural experience.

Using Letterset, stencil, paint drippings, Rohrer accomplishes a synthesis that is altogether not about representation, but instead captures that sense of memory that includes the unknown, and unconscious recognition, but these elements are always the reflection of a reality, a lost paradise. ( John K. Grande)