Born in 1979 in Tirlemont, Belgium
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
Touching from a distance
Jonathan Rosić’s work pursues a reflection on our impermanence and micro-disappearances. He catalogues, analyzes and amplifies the small cancellations of ourselves and attempts to make the fading of time per- ceptible. His meticulous Indian ink drawings were inspired by film stills, personal or found photographs. These inks focus on moments of voluntary or random concealment, on scenes of solitude, oblivion and incommunicability, on subjects or objects disappearing behind ambiguous gestures. The disappearance is expressed at different levels (the subject’s disappearance, hidden, or whose gaze is obstructed; the specta- tor’s disappearance, for the represented subject who does not see us anymore; the image’s disappearance, by dissipating with very diluted tones; finally, the artist’s hand’s disappearance, by a non-gestural technique, voluntarily placing him in the background behind his subject). As a complement to his drawings, Jonathan Rosić inventories, within the banal and intimate world of found photos, clues to our erasure: repetitive traces, classified into gestural categories, where the sign of absence becomes sculptural.
For a ppr oc he, Touching from a distance brings together Indian ink drawings based on old promotional photos of inventions, in which Rosić focuses on hands now holding only emptiness, as well as found photos where doors and handles await a hand to activate appearance and disappearance.
Trained as an architect (La Cambre, Brussels), Jonathan Rosić has taught architecture, and studied painting (La Cambre, Brussels). His awards include the Sabam Prize (Art Contest, Brussels, 2014), the Marcel Hastir Prize–Portrait (Royal Academy of Belgium, 2017) and the FID Prize International Drawing Prize (Paris, 2017). New work will soon be shown in a solo exhibition at Archiraar Gallery (Brussels) and at Drawing Now (Paris, 2023).
