RUBÉN DARIO KLEIMEER

Rubén Dario Kleimeer [Acándí Choco, Colombia 1978] is an artist/ photographer from Rotterdam with family ties in Gdynia [Poland].
He uses the medium photography to analyse and better understand urban spaces. With the gaze of an urban ethnographer, a researcher of spatial and social contexts, he explores the built environment in which we live, work and dwell. 

He studied interior architecture and fine arts at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam followed by a Masters in Photography at AKV|St.Joost Breda. 

What you pass is being highlighted. Ruben Dario Kleimeer abstracts Rotterdam in his recent series Imaginary Perspectives. From his imagination he photographs his hometown.

Through the collection and selection of images, Ruben’s love for architecture and skateboarding come together. Ruben approaches his work with an almost dogmatic slant. Balanced, tight and abstracted from its surroundings. In an intriguing way, he focuses on special forms in Rotterdam.

The eye of the beholder is constantly caught by seemingly trivial motifs of urban non-places. Pleasureless infrastructures and mute facades. Isolated bridgeways and silent arches. Tunnels into nowhere. Undetermined building details and anonymous interstitial spaces.

Rubén Dario Kleimeer’s photographs of urban scenarios in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Brussels, taken between 2018 and 2021, consistently declare the seemingly insignificant to be the essential. With great precision and artistic sensibility, the Rotterdam-based photographer takes on places in his hometown and abroad that are as significant as they are insignificant.

Empty of people and free of distortion, these urbanities appear almost object-like in the picture before an always overcast sky. Neither light nor shadow attract attention. The non-places stands still and quiet. It is not life and people but the built environment that vividly takes center stage in the photographs. Kleimeer attempts an exact survey of a spatial configuration in an explicitly factual and detailed manner. The perspective is frontal and unadulterated.

Despite this documentary sobriety of his extensive exploration of the urban space, Kleimeer succeeds in creating authentic photographs of high poetic quality, which seem to capture an imaginary potential of the unintentional. It is Kleimeer’s unadorned view of the ordinary that teaches the viewer anew the poetry of the everyday in almost abstract-artistic compositions

HERITAGE