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Mash Up
By Moltzer & De Kok
Mash Up is the result of a collaboration between code artist Elout the Kok and fine artist Narouz Moltzer. Zart brought the artists together as an experiment in the Mash Up project.The one-time-duo seems an odd couple at first sight. Whereas De Kok with his (often moving) work focuses on virtual space, Moltzer creates monumental works on canvas. Moltzer, apart from his ever growing presence on social media like instagram, does not have much to do with the digital field. However, what binds the artists is that both criticise society and its rules in their work.
Give a few thousand people a few simple rules, or in this case pixels, and you will immediately get a complete chaos, and funny patterns too, since each individual will apply the rules in his own way.
-Elout de Kok 2015-
Sampling Moltzer’s Big City
Elout the Kok interprets Moltzer’s Big City here. The print is literally a mash up of the original. De Kok sampled a part of the painting. He took various samples of interesting parts and tested a few existing software filters before he came up with the final result. To get the image that best expresses his feeling about Big City, he coded a new filter to get a soft and woolly effect.
New York
Moltzer makes what he calls: reaction art. He responds to what happens in his life and the world. Fans can follow him on instagram where he aims to post a painting a day (@narouzki). Big City is the interpretation of New York as Moltzer has experienced at that time. De Kok, in his turn, started working from the feeling that he had for this work. The monumental painting is full of contrasts: on the one hand reflects the somewhat dark and confined space that crowded city is. At the same time it is cheerful, colourful and one gets the feeling that anything can happen anytime because of the painting’s rich details. It is both static and dynamic.
New rules
In Mash up, De Kok rewrites the rules of the city jungle. De Kok softened the bright colors and turns the boxes of the origial painting into soft edged figures. De Kok translates the reality of the concrete jungle in a new friendlier one, by adjusting the rules; by modifying a sample of the Big City with a filter. Wouldn’t it be great if we could change the world tomorrow, by just writing a new filter?
More about the artists
You can see more examples of De Kok’s work on :http://pixel-lab.org/
or http://elout.home.xsall.nl
Follow Narouz Moltzer on Instagram : @narouzki
or check his website: http://www.narouz.nl
Ludy’s stories of cruelty and madness
Recent developments in e.g. the Middle East show, once again, that civilisation is nothing but a thin chrome layer that over time will peel and flake. One of our Zartians, Ludy, made a series of literary paintings based on old stories that suddenly seem very contemporary. Her paintings remind us that cruelties and atrocities are not a new invention. “The Green Ionian islands on the West Coast of Greece are the place where I travel around a lot”, she writes us. Here she picked up many stories and recycled them into paintings. Ludy: “Some of these stories, describe such cruel behaviour that I felt a need to tell what happened in a series paintings”.
Portrait Inside, see below, is about an aristocrat’s daughter, who falls in love with a poor village boy. This enrages her family and especially her father who locks her up in a convent. But her lover does not give up and brings her a serenade. When the father hears about this he loses it completely and comes to a most horrific solution: he beheads the lover. Then keeps the poor girl locked up in the attic with the severed head of the man she hoped to marry. Short fuses they had”, Ludy tells. And if no one saved the girl, she must still be locked up somewhere.
Zart does not have the complete collection of Ludy’s work but showcases 4 pieces. Check her artist page to see more.
Ludy’s page >
Zart Quote – Ludy
Ludy’s paintings refer to myths and folk tales from Greece.
‘I am my own Model’
‘I am my own model’ (Sim 2014). A simple and complex sentence at the same time. In the works you see here, Round and Round and Circles, fine artist and illustrator Sim used a camera with a self-timer and some large screens as a starting point to get the work going. Very refreshing is that you are not looking at a regular selfie. Neither are the works made as a comment on body politics. There are also no hidden feminist statements about the search for a female visual language. Sim uses images of herself for no other than practical reasons.
Sim:”I have been searching for models for a very long time. Either they have limited time or they are too expensive. So I decided to be my own model. “In the beginning I had to get used to the idea of seeing myself as an image”, Sim admits. “I had to get over the feeling to start correcting things about myself. At the same time it felt comfortable to paint myself, Sim tells. “How can painting your own contours feel strange? I do not look at all kinds of imperfections I could find but focus on form and posture”.
Art will not be silenced
#jesuischarlie
“Freedom is not a given. It has been conquered. People fought for it. Freedom too often has been written in blood. So artists, creatives and journalists, keep working. When, where, and while you can. Above all, because you can.” (By a Zartian Anonymous)
