Rik Oostenbroek has been working in digital for over twenty years, with no academic background behind him, driven only by curiosity about how images work and why they trigger certain emotions. Out of his self-taught path came a personal visual language, built on abstraction, color and movement, which over the years has led him to collaborate with names like Apple, Mercedes Benz and Swatch, as well as to pass through Art Basel, Paris Photo and Amsterdam’s MOCO Museum. Several projects tell the story of where his research is heading.

Territoire is the project Rik Oostenbroek has been carrying forward the longest, and he never quite considers it finished. At its core lies a precise method: starting from real physical textures and translating them into digital three-dimensional space, until they become landscapes that don’t exist but seem to recall something already seen. The works sit on the border between geographic recognizability and pure chromatic invention, with light, water and natural matter still being added to the project over time.

With Kleur, his first solo show, staged this past winter at Boldhalle, Brno, Oostenbroek takes things a step further: from visual research to a statement of intent. The starting point is a question that concerns every creative today: if technical skill can be copied, even automated, what’s left to define an artist? The exhibition’s answer is taste — that layering of experiences, influences and personal decisions that no system can truly replicate.

The show’s sections, from Light Bends to Tunnels through to the Phantom Outputs, made by processing over thirty thousand AI-generated images, aren’t trying to prove technical superiority; instead, they stage a chromatic sensibility that stays recognizable whatever tool is used to get there, whether that’s a fine art print or an AI output.

The thread running through all of Rik Oostenbroek’s work is the conviction that, of everything that can be taught and reproduced, taste remains the one truly personal signature.