Under one Rooth

Gustaf Rooth says his new gallery will focus on high-end art and solo instead of group shows.
- Photo by Kinsee Morlan

There’s something about the way pencil works with the grains and texture of wood, he says. Plus, he pushes too hard for canvas anyway.

Greenwald’s dark graphite lines connect to create faces whose place in time is hard to discern, and because he uses the negative space in the wood to color skin, their races are equally as ambiguous. The world he paints behind his mishmash of faces and bodies is distinctly urban with fragments of things like leaves and vines. When it comes time for the background, he says, he often looks at whatever’s right in front of him.

“This is my alleyway if you’re looking out my front door,” he says, pointing to one of his paintings. “And this one right here is my front window if you’re sitting on my couch,” he says, drawing attention to what, with context, becomes a set of vertical venetian blinds.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, 5,500 miles away, Sara Szyber is busy in her studio in south Stockholm working on a few of her own projects and preparing a talk she’ll give in San Diego next week. Szyber is an interior, product and furniture designer who’s worked on everything from a children’s exhibition that toured Europe to something she calls the “Pleasure-String,” a hands-free, wearable silicon sex toy.

“I was nearly born into [design],” Szyber told an Ohio public-radio interviewer in November 2009. Both her grandmother and mother were designers, so, she said, she never really had a choice.

Back in San Diego, Gustaf Rooth is wearing his trademark blue cutoff overalls and a tool belt, furiously working with his friends to get his new gallery ready for a big Oct. 9 grand opening.

“Half of this place has been built on Corona,” he says, smiling and swigging what’s left of a bottle in front of him. “When we signed the lease on this place, I was nearly in tears. I could not believe we had this whole house. Then, after the stars started to diminish from my eyes, it was down to fixing the building. So—10 months—I’m 10 months in and I’ve had, like, two days off, working relentlessly on restoring this building to its original integrity.”

The “new Planet Rooth,” as the Sweden-boartist and furniture designer calls it, is a two-story, 4,000-square-foot home in

Hillcrest that’s more than 100 years old. For the most recent leg of its journey, the building housed a flower shop. Rooth and his friends are still working on patching the floors and the walls where the giant refrigerators once stood. They’re opening the space with a traveling exhibition, 17 Swedish Designers, which features the sleek, simple and modern furniture and object designs of 17 women, including Szyber, who’ve shown in Sweden's famed Gallery Pascale in Stockholm. Szyber is also the exhibition designer, and she´ll give her talk in the gallery at 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 10.

After the month-long run of the design show, on Nov. 5, Greenwald will open his solo show and help kick off what Rooth is calling “5th on 5th.”

“It’s my new thing—you’ve probably heard,” Rooth says, sitting in the workshop area behind the house where he and his partners build their wine- and bourbon-barrel chairs under the business name Barrelly Made It. “And 5th on 5th will be different than Ray at Night. It’s not going to be an art walk. It’s going to be a community walk, and it will be all up and down Fifth Avenue in Bankers Hill and Hillcrest, and it will happen on the fifth of every month.”

Rooth doesn’t want to talk too much about Ray at Night. He helped found and grow the monthly art walk on North Park’s Ray Street, but he says the event has since lost its purpose. He doesn’t want to talk much about his old neighborhood, either—but without too much provocation, he’ll tell you that he thinks North Park has been over-gentrified. He’ll go on to fill you in on his personal experience with a landlord who raised the rent of his studio / gallery so high that he couldn’t afford it anymore, and he’ll say that he thinks North Park is a lot worse off without him.

“Let’s put it this way,” says Rooth, who acknowledges his sizable ego: “Someone stopped me the other day in Hillcrest and said, ‘Aren’t you Gustaf Rooth?’ I said yes. And he said, ‘Wow, you’re really missed on Ray Street. We’ve gone to the last few Ray at Nights and we were disappointed, especially by the last one, the ninth anniversary.’ It wasn’t talked about. It wasn’t written about. It wasn’t celebrated and it wasn’t up to me to remind everybody that it was the anniversary. But the guy said that he was really saddened about me closing the gallery, and he asked, ‘So what are you doing now?’” That’s when Rooth’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head. When he starts talking about the plans for the new place, he shakes with excitement. He says they’ll do unplugged music shows in the big bay window at the front of the building. He says they want to build a kitchen, serve food and make the space more of an old-school European art salon where people gather to discuss ideas. Sometimes, he says, they’ll rent out the space for special events, but mostly they’ll focus on putting on what he says will be high-end art shows featuring artists from Europe to San Diego.

If you didn’t know his history or never attended any art shows at his old space, you might think the guy’s trying to do too much and, perhaps, is full of hot air. But if the two upcoming shows at Planet Rooth say anything, it’s that he’s off to a pretty interesting start.

“We’ll still do the parties we did before, but we’ve graduated,” he says, slipping on a pair of work gloves and strapping on his tool belt again. “You know, I’m 42 now. I feel like we’ve reached a new level—an echelon—and that’s what I’m hoping San Diego is going to understand. And, hopefully, San Diego will understand that I was not fucking around when I started Ray at Night long ago, when I said we’re gonna do something in this city with style, integrity and grace.”

The new Planet Rooth Studios Haus is located at 3334 Fifth Ave. in Hillcrest. Visit 17swedishdesigners-sandiego.com for more on the opening show.