Art by Jean-Daniel Rohrer
Jean-Daniel Rohrer was born May 22nd, 1960 in Tramelan, Switzerland. He immigrated to Canada in 1989. His work was showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland, Canada and United States.
...Rohrer's paintings are like memory maps. They are never caught up in a specific moment in time. Instead Rohrer plays on the ambiguity of memory, and of history, or our collective memory. He works outwards from the centre of his canvas, gradually building a surface that carries a lot of potential meaning. These recent paintings allude to European history, Amerindian traditions, and collectivize these in a way that treats the painterly surface as a field that can receive any number of potential meanings. The canvas surface is a field, and it has markings - letters - stencil marks - directional markers - photo and text images. 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 the significance into the vernacular of history, and uses the ephemera of popular culture and imagery from high art together in a single work....
- John K. Grande
Author and art critic
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.
