Soderbergh's Charm 3

In these new works “Soderberg’s Charm”, I am seeking aesthetic relationships between romantic interior environments from Portugal specifically, azulejos (ceramic tiles) and romanticism in cinema specifically, Steven Soderberg’s Ocean’s films. Often blurring the lines between painting, illustration, montage and photography and heavily influenced by the music of David Holmes and Nicole Conte.

In these recent experiments I’ve been creating drawings of azulejos and other interior architectural lines and patterns then removing them out of their context even further, placing them in an unfamiliar context hoping to immolate a similar sense of pleasurable unease. In this case the context is the interior environments from Soderberg’s “Ocean’s” films, where contrasting and heavily decorated interior environments and lighting play an important role in conveying a strong sense of romanticism and artificial idealism. 

As for the images which are all in medium format 645 crop, I treats screenshots from various films with the same care and attention as personal photographs by observing and re-observing the scene and its composition then finally committing to a set of screen-shots.

I then use the screenshots from the films as a backdrop to convey my own form of romanticism. On to which a layer of heavily pigmented epoxy resin is poured then left to dry. As the final layer, a drawing that is also a partial painting is expressed.