'Flat Tire' by Janis Dzirnieks at Robert Fruinstraat 56, Rotterdam

In a basement a series of lamps works, found on the streets of Rotterdam, which the artist has altered to different degrees, act as attractors, inviting the viewers to circulate and gravitate around them. These are exhausted objects, in which the frigid halo of mass production has given way to the warmer, yet slightly putrid sense of familiarity and abandonment of second hand items. As humans and animals, we are biologically programmed to pay attention to light, yet we cannot stare at it directly for a long time, else we get dazzled. This is the sense in which these lamps act almost (perhaps mockingly) as paradigmatic art objects. Next to these are a series of wall works. Printed on a variety of media and covered in high gloss resin, these works begin their journey as screenshot from the almost bottomless cycle of pop ups and banners that load up, as if they came from a murky “nowhere,” in websites offering free content, such as movie streaming, torrents, or forums, each time different in their necrotic aphasia, in funereal dissonance with reality. Purposely stretched and mangled further through Photoshop’s algorithms, they turn into digital drips, glitches, abstract shapes, or color fileds, among which some figurative elements stay grotesquely recognizable.

— Marco Rizzardi