Sandro Kopp: What You See Is What You Get (2025)

Dynamic, immersive, and visually stimulating, Kopp’s expressive and emotive paintings create a space of surprise and endless possibilities. Of German and New Zealand descent and based in Scotland since 2006, his practice extends beyond Nationalist concerns and continues the conversations of modern abstraction in a contemporary technologically driven world. He works intuitively and instinctively, confidently and courageously applying paint to canvas, exploring visual manifestations of both subconscious and conscious thought.

Transcending visual story-telling, narrative elements are only suggestions for the viewer. Perhaps perceived as anthropomorphic in character, his practice is deeply rooted in the figurative. In Radical Aliveness wispy hair-thin lines, the colour of fire, intertwine like limbs, and shapes merge and form as if dancing bodies. Fleshy colours appear to pulse and throb underneath the skin of the canvas in Cocoon, perhaps twisted insides of an organic entity. Structures are broken down to a cellular level where abstract colours appear to float and collide in Iconocluster. Are we viewing the body at the microscopic or telescopic?

Kopp’s artworks express a confidence, awareness and exuberance with the medium of paint. His mark-making is expressive and gestural yet also tentative and considered. As a viewer, one can perceive a sort of “energy” from his painting. Pastel, translucent layered spheres in Bobulated create a calm and contemplative space, while the illusion of exploding white light in the darkness of Cryptesthesia seems to be a capture in time of an unexplained event.

Many New Zealand modernists expressed diffused light, broad areas of flat colour, often earthy tones and hues of the landscape. Kopp presents a striking difference. Sophisticated and playful, his distinctive colour palettes talk to exotic locations, international fashion and imagined colour combinations. Subficial is a cacophony of complimentary hues – reds and greens alongside purples and oranges cause chaotic harmony by moving the viewer’s eyes back and forth as well as around the picture plane.

As contemporary technology and AI ideology threaten the culture of creativity, Kopp presents paintings that explore intuition, emotion and artistic instinct, presenting them as a “small pocket of organic consciousness made manifest”1 and boldly asks his audience to continue the creative journey.

1. Sandro Kopp, Artist Statement, 2025.