Nico Krijno (b1981) is an artist working with video. staged photography, and collage* in an experimental photographic practice that investigates contemporary visual codes, archetypes, symbols and patterns. Exploring not only these methods of creation but the spaces in-between
︎︎︎ pure research
FAQ (NATURE VS. CULTURE) Seeing is Not Believing
most of these words were written on my phone whilst hiking barefoot on an empty stomach
I am not in search of the perfect moment.
I use photography to create new worlds within my perceived reality, to ask questions about memory, photography, and its representation and re-presentation.
I work with both analogue and digital tools, and I also use the clone stamp and the lasso tool.
Rather than merely capturing emotion, I aim to evoke an emotional response in the viewer that feels strangely familiar. A kind of alchemy, a trompe l’oeil, a Brechtian making strange.
My work does not follow a linear series. It is one continuous and interwoven body of work, like a conversation that never stops. Ideas shift over time, older themes return, and new ones appear.
I am not only interested in what lies in front of the camera. I am equally drawn to what lies behind, beneath, and to the side of the frame.
Good ideas matter more to me than sharp or colourful or pretty pictures.
Photographs should rarely need text to support them, although that itself may be untrue.
I am guided by the basic tenets of Gestalt theory: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and connectedness.
I follow gut feelings through my one right eye.
I use video, photography and painting in conversation with each other.
My influences include Michael Schmidt, Roe Ethridge, John Divola, John Gossage, Lucas Blalock, Robert Cumming and Richard Tuttle.
An image made with a smartphone is as meaningful as one made on large format or with a potato pinhole camera.
I knew all of this before, but I lacked the language to express it.
I am interested in sculpture and form, but my main concern is transformation, the moment when a thing becomes something else through the camera.
My work can be read as a sampler of photographic genres. Portraits, landscapes, nudes and still lifes sit together to reveal the medium and its limitations.
The only part of my process that I truly value is intellectual curiosity expressed through experimentation. Strategy over certainty.
If I ever begin to know exactly where the work is going, I will stop.
This is an ode to effort.
My work lives inside my body. Mind, body and technology.
I use what I find lying around and convert this debris into a theatrical mise en scène through a form of creative alchemy.
This urban jetsam and flotsam carries its own knowledge and its own built-in aesthetic, which I unearth and explore in my constructions.
I try to surprise myself, to make unsolvable pictures that I have not seen before, and to get beneath the surface.
I trust the indecisive moment.
I believe in the power of the single image, but I am increasingly interested in the patterns and associations that appear when images are sequenced in a book or on a wall.
In a time when the internet is overwhelmed by slick and generically stunning AI images that cause visual fatigue, I sense the rise of a counter image. The idea of photography as a truthful index of reality is dissolving.
What is an image of, when anything can be faked? Does subject matter even matter?
A lo-fi Polaroid of your lover may one day feel more radical than a billion Midjourney hallucinations.
The near future of photography feels post gloss, grainy and unpolished, tactile, raw, and full of error. Embedded work such as film, damaged negatives, timestamped chaos. Work that asserts presence.
AVAILABLE WORKS
All works are in a Limted Edition of
03 Prints only
certain works are UNIQUE
Mostly works on paper
Archival Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag®
+ certificate of authenticity
certain works are printed onto 100% Cotton Hahnemühle Cézanne® Canvas
︎ see also
send all your requests to nicokrijno@gmail.com
All content copyright the artist. No commercial use without express written permission.