Sandro Kopp: GalaXcells (2024)

Simultaneously hiding and revealing, the central roles of drawing and the human body are fundamentally evident in all of Sandro Kopp’s painting practice. In GalaXcells, his first solo exhibition in New Zealand since rising to international prominence, Kopp explores visual divisions and tensions while concurrently questioning and celebrating what we see and how we see it.

Demonstrating a most atypical compositional sense and a complete rejection of perspectival regularity, Kopp twines figures and poses together. He elongates bodies, models form, delivers “cell structures down to the molecular level.”1 In this manner, he builds pictorial melanges which are anthropomorphic in character, where figures float in seemingly uncertain, idiosyncratic environments. Whether comprised of images drawn from deep space or direct from nature, from fluid form landscapes or the intensity of extreme closeups, Kopp is very actively and deliberately inviting the viewer into the overall process of perceiving what is there. It is that very conscious activity he seeks from us. At once beautiful and tense, as if forgoing the forces of gravity, when the figures emerge – become recognised by the viewer – a very significant transformation happens: suddenly the shapes seem to have mass and weight. The paintings coalesce into another reality, a parallel world. Another galaxy.

Kopp draws “models as a starting point, usually in live sessions on Zoom or Skype,” this being “a way of working” he has been developing “since the earliest days of video-telephony in 2010.” He is “looking for alien structures in the familiar forms of bodies and for universal rhythms in landscapes, animals, plants, sea-creatures, galaxies and then morphing them into a symphony of shapes and colours, layering time, space and meaning until they each resonate with an atmosphere of their very own.”2

The Paletteye Series adds further to these numerous layered conversations about who is viewing who and how. The palette acts as a symbolic metaphor of painting’s tradition and practice, where Kopp is nevertheless emphasising process and materiality, drawing the viewer in, cueing construction and deconstruction. Equally, he is reminding us - demonstrating - that each eye is manifestly unique and utterly different as well; that the process of seeing begins the journey to knowledge, emotion and all human awareness.

1. Sandro Kopp, artist statement, February 2024.
2. Ibid.