Painting Machines & Milk Heaven
1
I released a print, “Milk Heaven,” with Exhibition A, hand-embellished with gold . More here.
2
Read my interview with Lolo y Sosaku at ArtReview here. An excerpt below + a video of their painting machines.
RS There’s a sense in your work that over time you’re sort of merging with the machines. Is that how it feels to you?
L Yeah, in the future when I start to fail, my knees or my legs or whatever, I would love to put on a mechanic arm, a mechanic leg. I would love to have a mechanical part of myself, fingers or whatever.
RS You admire industrial-era machines, but you aren’t dipping into newer technologies, like CGI.
L You know, we understand how these machines work, but artificial intelligence – we really don’t understand how that works. We like to see and touch the thing. We like the motors, to touch the motors. We like to work with our hands. We are kind of artists from the twentieth century. I love AI, but we don’t use it because we don’t understand it.
RS Do you feel a connection with the machines? They each seem to have a personality.
L We have a lot of feelings with them, but some of them are very cold and they don’t even look at us. They don’t know we are there. But some are beautiful and very kind. Some are very funny. Sometimes they don’t want to work. They go around the studio and sometimes one breaks and we repair it with love, and sometimes without love, and change it. We used 22 machines for one painting once and changed the machines during the process – adding arms, taking out arms, adding legs, adding a very long thing, making something new appear.
RS Are you –
L One writer asked us what we really like most. Sosaku said insects, I said trees. And then she said, but this doesn’t relate to your work? But in our work there is transformation. There is change. There is growing. Trees are open to change without their control, and insects are very similar to machines: it looks like they don’t have feelings. They don’t have expression in the faces. They also are transforming. Many of them change colours or change totally, as butterflies do.
