Stikstok (dates) is an Amsterdam based painter and visual artist. After working as an illustrator for several years, Stikstok started experimenting with painting two years ago, a choice that ultimately led to the development of what has now become his main artistic expression. It is this translation form illustration to painting that explains some of the formal qualities of Stikstok’s works: the choice of colors, which remain always within the same palette of warmth, and the preference for black human characters are a derivation from the stylistic properties of illustration, which is characterized by the predominance of black and the lack of colors.
The paintings, predominantly in acrylic, have big dimensions, a factor that allows the viewer to increase its proximity to the artist’s world. The subject matter and setting of the works is always the result of research: after searching the web or finding inspiration in books, surroundings, situations and people that populate his everyday life, Stikstok creates a moodboard which then leads to the creation of a new work.
The subjects of the paintings vary from idyllic natural scenery, populated by sensuous women (titel werk Chanda), to ordinary settings taken out of context (werk met Titi) and intricate bodies making love (titel). All of them, however, are pervaded by a sense of warmth, a pure and sensuous feeling of archaism that carries the traces of the primordial origin of the world. From the temperate red of the background, to the intricate forests and plants and the prosperous flowers and curves of human bodies, Stikstok’s paintings are silent witnesses of a far yet recognizable dimension: the one, eternal root of a (new?) begin. Humans and nature are united in ordinary scenes, which vary from fighting to making love: all actions are depicted as true, primordial indeed, delicate and simple in their purity. Even when some of the subjects are recognisable as actual people that connote Stikstok’s own life, they become symbols of humanity in general, whose actions are captured as fragmentary recollections of a previous - or future- time, of a world of beginnings where senses rule as the purest forms of expression.
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