short interview with Sol Kjøk

short interview with Sol Kjøk

What is your background ?

I grew up in a tiny village in the Norwegian mountains, but left my native country once I had finished high school. Since then, I have lived in Paris, Vienna, Medellin (Colombia) and a number of U.S. cities, where I studied languages, literature and art history. I am virtually self-taught in art techniques, but was nevertheless admitted to the Master of Fine Arts program in painting at Parsons School of Design in New York City. I graduated in 1998, and have since then lived and worked with other artists in a converted industrial loft in the Brooklyn neighborhood of New York.

When do you create ?

I am at work in my studio seven days a week. However, creation also happens on a mental level when you are not physically in front of your canvas. For one, I am a marathon runner, and many of my pictorial scenarios are conjured up during long runs in Central Park. That’s when I become an empty vessel into which at any moment anything may be poured – a blissful state very much akin to that of meditation and painting.

Who inspires your work ?

I can look at other artists, such as my big hero Egon Schiele, for technical pointers. However, the content of my own pieces is never derived from other people’s artwork: Since my images are stories about human relations and interactions, I am inspired by life experiences and the people around me.

What is art ?

Art is many things , but here is one aspect that is important to me: Drawing, one might say, is exactly what mass visual media are not: a means of specific, subtle and persistent engagement, not of general seduction. Works that slowly come into being only speak to those who look slowly. I find that the faster the pace of every other aspect of my life, the more the time-consuming, concentrated process of drawing appeals to me: this single-minded, obsessive focus is a way to stay grounded amidts the frenzy of New York.

Have you ever exhibited in Italy ?

No -- I'd like to, though!

Tell me more about your work:

My drawings and paintings are the visual terminus of a much longer method, and their surplus, or extravisual, meaning may be found in the archeology of their making: My process starts with performances staged in my studio, where my co-swirlers and I carry out potentially painful acrobatic exercises, such as walking the tight rope, climbing ropes or juggling, dribbling or balancing on balls.

This initial physical experience, driven by a desire to first experience as manifest reality the symbolic content of my images, is documented with a camera and subsequently mediated by cutting out the naked figures from these source shots and reassembling them into collages. Like lost wax, the photo collages gradually disappear while serving as visual documentation for drawings and finally paintings.

-- How do you image your work in a city space ?

I’d like to see my images as alternating wall projections at a scale where all my figures are life-size.

This should happen in a public venue that would also allow for ropes to be suspended from the ceiling. The ropes are intended as expansions into three-dimensional space of my current series’ central recurring pictorial element: The string of beads. Their presence in the exhibition venue brings the creative journey full circle, i.e. back to the initial physical experience occurring in my studio. The passers-by who willing to step into the circus ring to swing on the rope for a minute can see the images unfold from a participant’s perspective. And because my pictorial epic is partially a comment on being fully present in one’s body, I want the viewers to feel the strain in their own limbs as they slowly glide through the air.

Sol Kjøk also joined the gallery2006