Sandro Kopp: Intensive Care Units

This exhibition comprises three bodies of work, each of which is an exploration of the subjective perspective that figurative painting affords us.

We live in an age when we are continuously surrounded by lens-based still images that are created by the objective eye of the camera. In contrast the highly subjective human eye, heart and hand all combine to bring paintings into being. They chronicle lived experience over an extended period of time as well as the impulses and instincts that influence the interaction with materials which create these representations of another person.

An intensive caring gaze and an intensive caring touch are the basis of both this celebration of humanity and the struggle to communicate and make permanent personal and interpersonal experience.

The New Me III - Every few years I paint a self portrait in front of the mirror for 28 consecutive days (a lunar month). The work is displayed as one piece, in sequence, seven paintings wide and four high. This is the third series in the larger body of work which was begun in 2007. Each painting is finished and left as it is when the next one is begun.

The Eye Portraits of a wide-ranging group of friends and family were each painted from life before the beginning of the pandemic in many different locations: From tea gardens in Bangladesh to my artist studio in Scotland, to a Venetian palazzo. Each eye is intended as a window into the perception of the particular atmosphere of the sitting and the connection with the sitter. Occasionally the reflection in the pupil holds a tiny self portrait as well.

Finally, the Lockdown Zoom portraits were made in 2020, in the course of the initial lockdown during video chat conversation with dear people around the globe. The uncertainty of the pandemic made me feel that oil paintings were too permanent a thing to create in that moment, so I chose the lighter touch of small drawings made with intentionally non-archival markers. In retrospect perhaps they communicate a hope that this difficult time would fade away at some point like the colours used to represent that moment, while the human connection endures.

Artist statement, April 2021