SOPHIE KUIJKEN

Exposition Paris

Born in 1965 in Bruges and a graduate of the Ghent Academy of High quality Arts (Okay.A.S.Okay.), Sophie Kuijken paints strange and interesting portraits in the solitude of her studio in Leuven. Portraits whose strangeness is consciously accentuated by the classicism of the workmanship (of an virtually polished realism) and the poses adopted by the models: usually frontal portraits in bust type (typically full-length, typically elongated), utilizing educational “units,” right as much as the darkish backgrounds, projecting the determine onto the front of the canvas – terribly visible and pregnant shifting backgrounds casting a shadow of nothingness… Unusual swampy mists the place a swarthy man in a coral tracksuit is mendacity down (in front of a display?) with a calf, there; a child with bulging eyes floating in a golden gigoteuse so long as a practice, there; a pair mendacity head to toe, right here; a person parading in a pelisse… Painted within the method of the Flemish Primitives by a successive accumulation of skinny layers of acrylic paint, oil, and glaze, the characters who take a look at us, impassive, have one thing timeless and, at the similar time, very modern; bathed in a mysterious chiaroscuro chiseling their unusual physiognomies, they appear to us however acquainted. And for good purpose: they are the result of an accumulation of multiple identities, faces collected on the web and then superimposed to create artificial faces, devoid of id. Vertiginous ghosts…