With I Forgot To Say Stop On Our Way Home and Checkmate, Roukens continues his search into the experience of the ‘in-between’. He conducts a visual investigation into what happens in the space between high and low contrast. Between circle and square, and between hand-painted surfaces and those defined by tape. A new addition to Roukens’ toolkit to break through existing patterns, is his so-called ‘painting-further’. Where surfaces overlap, new surfaces are created.

In I Forgot To Say Stop On Our Way Home, Roukens refers to a moment in which you lose control while still in motion. At the same time Checkmate depicts the unpredictability and irreversibility of his painting process. You reach a point where you can’t go any further, even though that is exactly what is intended. Daan Roukens paints doubt itself and seeks to make this inner conflict visible and tangible through patterns, colour, and abstraction.

He searches for the in-between experience within the contradiction, where tension exists, but also balance. Roukens feels a strong need to take the viewer into this process and does so by creating videos of his painting process. He sees his work as a translation of his controlled chaos, reflecting on everyday dilemmas. Since Covid-19, his biographical work has served as an even more significant metaphorical mirror for the viewer, in a time where the social debate between opposites is larger than ever.