SOFT TONES #1 Momomi Cody Cobb Louize Zhang Phoebe Bishop-Wright
Roos van Dijkhuizen Lesia Paramonova Maxime Rappaz
SUCRE
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Index
10 / 11 4/5 Roos van Dijkhuisen
20 / 25
Editors’ picks
12 / 13
Sophie Tajan
6/7 Cody Cobb
26 / 27 Maxime Rappaz
14 / 19 Louise Zhang / Phoebe Bishop-Wright
8/9 Momomi
Lesia Paramonova
Editors’ note
Sucre is a print-only newspaper on fashion, design and fine arts. We came up with the idea for it a year ago and now are happy to present this creation and curation to you. We are geographically divided in two, one half is based in Paris, the other one is in Stockholm. A modern friendship, so to say, and a modern creation. We wanted to incorporate contemporary young artists and a modern design in a more tactical medium and use a classical way of distributing it. We believe that a little paper like Sucre is worth a hundred virtual and forgettable spaces. In the endless stream of images that the digital world keeps offering us, we picked the ones that mattered to us, that caught our attention through their uniqueness and quality, and that deserved their space in this bit of paper. We believe in the physicality of print, in the stains of ink it will leave on the tip of your fingers, in the smell that will tickle your nose. Ironically enough, a printed journal has become a far more precious form of expression than an expensive electronic device, simply because it exists in our hands. On the 28 pages we’ve gathered young artists from South Korea, USA, Sweden, Russia, France, Australia and the UK. Our first topic goes along with today’s zeitgeist - fashion and arts work a lot with soft tones, not just pastels but also smooth edges and fluidity within a range of disciplines. We would like to thank you for purchasing Sucre. We also would like to thank the wonderful people that contributed to this issue. Without you this would have been impossible. Thank you, Sophie Tajan and Angela Blumen
The cover photo is taken by Momomi. Contributors on next page are from left to right, upper to lower: Jessica Williams, Akito Shimoayama, Trey Wright, Emily Harriet, Madelyn Mulvaney, Tom Teodosijev, Aaron Feaver, Lukasz Wierzbowksi, Ksenia Maqa, Ele Valverde, Li Hui, Chloe Aftel.
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Maxime Rappaz Maxime is of the conclusion that purity is unattainable and is subject to each and everyone’s interpretation and aesthetic sense. We asked him to elaborate on his use of colours, shapes and the ideas behind his creations.
fashion Can you elaborate more on why the subject of your research is purity? Ever since I started studying and thinking about fashion and design, I’ve discovered for myself a strong aesthetic interest for purity, as much on a formal level as on a theoretical one. That’s why I have decided to work more seriously on my ideal of purity and to make it the subject of my thesis at the Head in Geneva. Your collection is directly inspired by a little series of photographs you shot (buildings, windows, curtains.). Can you explain how those elements became starting points for your creations? Apart from my theoretical research on purity, I wanted to bring an ambience, a verve to the collection. Throughout my research I often have both a theoretical and a more aesthetic and spontaneous aspects. The choice to base my creations on my photographic researches lead me to a theoretical and at the same time determining difficulty: I realized that absolute purity is unattainable since it is inevitably connected to our subjective and personal perceptions.
Photography by Baptiste Coulon
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You say you faced a constant hesitation between the circle and the square; did you have other ideas using the circle as a basis for your collection? It is true that I often hesitate between those two shapes. But in the end, I don’t think that one is more important than the other. The square shape seems to have a more important place in my collection, although it also might be the circle (the shoulders, the wrinkles that are sound) which takes the strength from the square. At the moment I can’t imagine putting a leather sign on a skirt. The collection relies on the observation that purity is unreachable, and it evokes a game of constructions offering many possible compositions. Was that a way for you to answer the impossibility of this ideal? More or less. Considering that absolute purity does not exist (which was actually a serious and severe conclusion), and that we can only evoke it, I felt free to propose my own vision of this concept, and everything became easier for me. The desire to confront round and natural body shapes to the neat and ideal shapes of the flat or 3D accessories came to me via my theoretical researches (Judd, Mondrian, Platonician art) and from my photographic researches (the soft blur of curtains confronted to the windows’ architecture). Of course I had all the silhouettes and their precise accessories in mind, but I wanted to play with an obsessional and almost hypnotical radicality. That is why I accompanied my collection with a stop motion video with musical background by Bach. The different plays of constructions resulted from this stop motion video. Can you tell us about the meaning behind the two colours you chose for your collection? I’ve always liked that light blue color, I do not really know why. That’s also a colour you can find in my research photographs. My first collection about “the square” that I presented for my diploma only had two colours, mint blue and beige-grey. When I had the opportunity to recreate my silhouettes for the Hyères Festival, I wanted to show something different. After new researches, the colour pink became quite obvious to me. Apart from a purely aesthetic and subjective choice, I have no other explanation.
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Lesia Paramonova
fashion
Lesia, a fashion designer and also a multidisciplinary artist, talks about her influences of nature, her home country and how its culture has influenced her.
Your design is anchored in Russian culture. How does growing up in Russia influenced you and your art? Russian cultural heritage has influenced my work very much. The great young Russian artists and composers were the stimuli to me. They created their own unique worlds, where love of nature and man are closely intertwined with something magical. At this point, I want to stay in Russia. I feel that I can revive a new interest in my country. Matrioshka and Khokhloma have been fed up with everything long enough. How does nature play a role in your work? The forest is a portal to another world to me. When I’m in the woods, I lose sense of time and space. I feel a special presence, which does not occur when I’m in town. How does being female play a role in your work? My general object of inspiration is the woman. The beauty of women is unlimited. I have different images in my head every time – magic, romantic, naive, nostalgic or modern. But it is the girl who looks like a girl. I don’t like andromorphous images and so I try to focus on the female figure. What moved or inspired you to become a designer? I could already feel it during my childhood. I loved to drawing and create different things with my hands. Those impulses were impossible to control. I think that it was genetically passed on to me. My grandmothers and great-grandmother were very good at sewing.
Tell us more about your future projects! I just finished my new collection for Fall/Winter 13-14. where you can see a completely different forest. It a is fantastic forest - artificially grown. There are many mythical animals and plants which have undergone extraordinary mutations. I painted and created all the prints on the clothing. Now I am in the process of creating a film about my new collection. It will be released by the end of April. It is a history of seven girls and one lady. These girls are like plants. They live in a greenhouse, under special conditions and they do not know about another life. Their clothes are like uniforms. I was inspired by image of schoolboy era of the USSR. You are an artist of many areas - how does each area influence the other? What is the difference when working with each medium? I think that future of fashion will be merging different art forms and skills. Now I try to combine film, painting, music and fashion. What do colours mean to you? How do you pick? What goes first, what inspires you? I am inspired by all the colours that exist in nature. It’s simple. We must be attentive to what is around us. They tell me that my clothes are very cheerful. It’s true. I love life and I would want that we wear our clothes in the most vivid colors.
Photography by Ivan Kaydash
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Roos van Dijkhuisen Roos, an emerging print maker from Scotland, talks about her research within the organic, the miniature and her fascination for science. How does working on different scales but always with small objects influence your art and the dialogue you are having with the viewer? I have a tendency to explore from the perspective of a magnifying glass. The most interesting subjects for me are made up of natural fibres, they have the most impressive structures, and can hold a complex amount of colour and pattern. Although organic, they also have the ability to be extremely abstract in shape and can be broken down into a singular solid that can represent many other existing forms. I come across pieces of wood, glass, wire that are adaptable to work into a weave with drawings or idea developments. Objects I make tend to form in multiples, I found power in repetition during my printmaking degree. I found ceramics has a means of using print and reproduction that encouraged me to experiment with my marks escaping the paper. The tone and handling of clay can make a fragile and soft presence similar to paper. People want to hold them, collect them.
fine arts
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What kind of dialogue are you having with your works? My prints in the past were very centred around natural phenomena, wanting to investigate human perception and the emotion of amazement and its quality of infinity. I was very involved with repetitive mark-making and using colour as a heightening of sense, creating a spirit. The subjects would be erupting, flowing, expanding, shedding. I wanted the viewer to be immersed within the movement of the image, to create instant pleasure in aesthetic. Looking back they appear as more fantastical, sci-fi landscapes. At present, natural structures are still present in my work, they are more dismantled fragments of textures, colour, and shape forming into different compositions as I continue to draw. Plotted as more of a graph instead of an impulsively layered pattern. I would like to combine print and drawing to produce more sculptural works that resemble impressions of three dimensional marks on a space, fluctuating. How does colour matter for you? For me colour is about triggering the sensual. It has the ability to satisfy my taste buds. It has the power to seduce, disgust, allure, uplift, distress. It was an obsessive pleasure to compact colour onto paper; to contrast, blend, block out, tint, intensify. At the moment I am minimising the palette to rediscover how I would like to approach colour and work more with textures and tones. Still, it is so much fun in printmaking. You are both scientific and organic, how do they interact with each other? My science: components that make up a shape -> the shape creates a structure -> the structure develops a texture -> the texture sustains a matter. For me creative materials are made more exciting when treated as part of a chemistry equation. The elements of ingredients, mixtures, reaction, and effect are part of my thought process behind making works. I personally find it hard to distinguish the organic from the scientific. Abstraction can be cold like symbols and mathematics, which combined with the derived from living matter creates a playful investigation. I find joy in visually working out the combination of marks light and strict, not that it needs to make sense. The science becomes the composition of the images: graphs display, diagrams explain. The fragments can then be reinterpreted as a whole.
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Cody Cobb The photographer Cody Cobb takes us on his adventurous travels where he encounters desert, abandoned or not yet discovered landscapes. His photography reflects his interest in nature and geology rather than society. Tell us the story behind the church - it’s both similar to and different from the pictures that you usually take. I came across this church while exploring the strange towns, oil fields and swamps of northwest Louisiana late at night. It was way too hot during the day so I had to take advantage of the dark. This luminous religious symbol was pretty hard to miss. My interests have slowly shifted from architecture to nature, but my attraction to simple geometry and mysterious light is the same. Lately, it’s been easier for me to find that aesthetic in remote landscapes but this particular scene had those same qualities. What does colour photography conveys for you in comparison to black and white? Why do you prefer colour? I’m incredibly fascinated by the subjectivity of color perception as well as the neurological condition of synaesthesia. My own personal synesthetic perception of color and sound may be guiding the images I generate. Isolating quiet or melodic moments in color can be challenging and that seems to be one of the big advantages of black and white photography. Some of my favorite photographs are black and white, so maybe I’m attempting to capture the same type of emotion in a wider visual spectrum.
photography
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What is important while capturing atmosphere? It’s probably most important for me to be genuinely affected by whatever the scene is. Atmosphere is such a powerful emotional trigger and it can’t be forced. We never see people in your photos. What makes landscapes more attractive to you? Most of my adventures have been solo in an attempt to fully focus on my surroundings without distraction. After a few days of isolation, my observation processes feel intensified and I can easily slip into a sustained flow state. I don’t have to forcibly compose scenes, they just materialize. I really love spending time outdoors with my favorite humans, but the experience is so different. I’m most attracted to the distorted sense of scale that only vast landscapes can evoke. Since your landscapes are all from America, how does the American cultures, especially things like road trips reflect in your photography? There are so many places in the world that I’d love to visit, but I haven’t had a chance to travel outside of the US. Longdistance flights seem exhausting. There’s so much variety in the landscapes, I don’t think I’d ever be able to exhaust my list of destinations. I don’t necessarily associate my photos with American culture, nor do I feel influenced by it. Cultural diffusion has made it hard for me to identify where I am most of the time. I’m more interested in geology than society. What is your insight on contemporary photography? Trying to keep up with contemporary photography is a bit overwhelming for me. My only exposure to photography is through the internet and that’s only when I happen to have a reliable connection. I have a few incredibly talented friends whose work I follow intensely when I can, but I know I’m missing out on so much wonderful and inspiring work.
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Momomi
feature Momomi is a Seoul based photographer who explores the beauty of her daily life, capturing scenes which according to her should not be forgotten. A part of her photos are a testimony of her surrounding. These pictures hold shadows of trees on a wall, soft evening lights caressing an ice wall or traced shapes in the sand. These pictures simultaneously reveal her fascination with patterns, shapes and minimalistic compositions. The other part of her photos portrays Momomi’s friends in beautiful moments. These different modes of composition create both a dialogue and a peaceful balance within her photographs. Moreover, the delicate use of colours and soft tones makes Momomi’s work so alluring. Today Momomi is working on several independent publications: one is about her journey to Paris, and the other is an upcoming zine dealing with vegetation that will come out in September. She playfully applies her talents to commercial work: she recently shot Spring Crocus 2013 S/S lookbook, a smart combination of surprising still life shots and fashion.
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CLOUD CITY
Photography : Sophie Tajan Styled: Megane Laroche Model: Juliette Lamet
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Louise Zhang
fine arts Can you explain which mediums you use and your relationship with/to them? I primarily use oil paints in my paintings and prisma pencils for my drawings. The texture of oil paints is seductive; a heavily pigmented pencil is very satisfying. As terribly romantic as that sounds it is the truth and it is simply the delight of discovering how it behaves, handling it, manipulating it and using it that makes me want to keep on playing. A lot can be conveyed by how the medium is handled. Tell us about your future plans and aspiration as an upcoming artist. I have a couple of group shows coming up, so I am preparing for those. Long term wise I would love to be able to be a practicing artist that is also financially stable. I think all young serious artists aim to achieve that same goal!
What do colours mean to you?
How does living in Sydney influence you?
Colour can be manipulated to provide form and often that is the case in my practice. I acknowledge there is a distinct palette I am biased towards. I’m still on the process of figuring out why I am drawn to these colours. This uncertainty is both frustrating and exciting.
Sydney holds some events such as the Sydney Festival and Art Month dedicated to the arts. There is also a small number of successful artist run initiatives and scholarships available. I do not think it is the best place to make art as Sydney seems to be more business orientated and lacks long term opportunities for the fine arts, especially young artists. Perhaps I just have not found where the bustling art world is hiding here.
What is an explorative moment for you?
How do you think is the art world is going to look like in the future?
A lecturer at my university once told me something along the lines of “Everything is as important as the other”. Basically, he spoke about all the marks on a painting, the accidents, the scratches on the board, the paint spilling over the edge, these are all connected. It was such an obvious thing yet I had not realised! The painting is no longer just the image, it is the whole piece, the front and back of the surface, everything of it.
Technology definitely has influenced the art world and I have no doubt it will continue to do so in the future. The internet has provided opportunities to connect with audiences, artists and like minded people much more easily and efficiently, take tumblr for example, a simple ‘like’ and you are connected. A lot of the opportunities I have been receiving are through the internet. It is a very exciting thing to watch how the internet influences the art world and vice versa.
While colour is significant in my practice, it offers no direct meaning but rather conveys meaning.
words
Soft tones by Phoebe Bishop-Wright
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luke warm pale tepid weak tea & winter sunlight over diluted blackcurrant squash & Artex ceilings like the top of lemon meringue pies but made from 1970s asbestos ghostly bicycle memorials & cloudy apple juice decrepit taxidermy & unripe avocados anemia, nausea & albino lions insect wings & peeling lychees when it’s snowing Philip shaving his head & eating raspberry ripple ice cream in my bed my duvet striped like a giant marshmallow flump frogspawn, soap & sugared almonds maps & mould & mother of pearl buttons expired polaroids & Beatrix Potter illustrations creeping suspicion & sleep deprivation ‘Carnation Lily Lily Rose’-quartz & nursery rhyme newborn colour stereotypes amethyst & spit & citrus pith peroxide powder & pavements scribbled with chalky rainbows my antique attic kimono pink grapefruit Tic-Tacs & Japanese matcha Kit-Kats pistachio milkshakes & East London lavender ombre hair trends antiseptic toothpaste & cobwebs & dread plaster of Paris & passport pages ugly bridesmaid dresses & silver birches white washes after one red rogue sock’s snuck in love-worn denim The Clangers’ blue string pudding Bridget Jones’ blue string soup scar tissue & the faded display shoe bruises & using flying saucers as sherbet maracas stains that have almost disappeared & racist sticking plasters skeleton leaves & the long forgotten content of flower presses desiccated bunches of lamppost freesias commemorating car crashes beach bleached eyelashes subdued hue spectrum swatches; oat, shell, biscuit, fawn, celery, ivory, porcelain, linen, cherry blossom jelly fish Laura Ashley monopoly money & cartoon envy glowing E. Coli & My Little Pony Sobranie cocktail cigarettes & Easter’s pastel foiled confectionary robin’s eggs & waiting rooms wallpaper & Degas’ ballerinas disappointment & the morning after regret & guilt & Lake Retba hope & Spring & veins & advert campaigns by Juergen Teller Chanel Spring Couture 2010 ash & bubblegum & iced gems glass gem sweetcorn & hypo plasma corn snakes cardamom pods & rhubarb fool & dull aches dolly mixture & Polly Pockets pictures of tumours on Pall Mall packets Disney princesses & rigor mortis lichen & Battenberg & pigeons silly string & gingham & hospital green post it note yellow & pretending Parma Violets were pills opals & marble paper & Palmer’s cocoa butter wedding confetti, seven year old girl’s birthday parties & mechanically reclaimed meat Marie Antoinette & afternoons wolf’s milk slime & e numbers cucumber eyes & my concealed thighs
All kinds of reproduction of this paper are prohibited All rights belong to the photos’/artworks’ owners. Design by Angela Blumen. Photo editor Sophie Tajan. Art direction, writings, etc by Sophie and Angela. Feel free to contact us at sucre.le.mag@gmail.com Or like us on facebook.com/sucrepaper