Iris Slock

Iris Slock as commented by others:

Final victory for love

Warm colours, playful forms. Feelings of satisfaction en freedom, of honesty and simplicity – that is Iris Slock at her best. Where other artists want to give a statement, a protest, an accusation  or a satire on reality, Iris wants to express the loving, the warm and cozy side of life.

“The more miserable the world is, the more positively I express my ideas and feelings on canvas”, says Iris. The artist that refuses to bow for the gravitaty of misery. It is the positive counter pression; it is the desire for balance; it is the pleasant bath of dreaming poetry. But such does not come lightly. Painting is hard work, as Iris knows. She wrestles with the canvas, the paint, and the brushes. To master the beautiful play of shapes and lines, that hineside appears  so obvious and natural.

She is inspire by South American and African music, from the ancient cultures of Mexico, West Africa and other, often primitive societies. That primitive, earth bound aspect is what inspires Iris. “I love simple things, it is modesty that that attracts”.

One sees it in her work. Always there are people. Sometimes people satisfied being on their own, but also (yes please!) people together, with animals, and dancing. People in freedom, where fish and birds appear pleasant company.

In few lines and sober images, Iris' people come to life, they dance, they move or they look at us dreamingly. They tell us how warm and inviting the world may be. In partial and in full simplicity. They have discovered the happiness of humanity, and have enclosed that in heir hart as precious wisdom. Misery and aggression have been abolished, love has overcome gloriously.

W. Doesborg, 2007

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Marc & Pablo & then as weather forecast.

Cryptic?

The answer hangs on the walls. They are the paintings of Iris Slock. Never heard of it?

That changes from the moment you've seen her work; you will not let that go.

Her figures seem to hang in the air and to float. Approximately as Marc Chagall painted his figures. The use of color by Iris also reminds us of Chagall's work. Sometimes I detect traces of Picasso. Consider her "Oceano": her abstract painted fish that seem to sunbathe on a bath towel while the towels seem to be waves again. Or her "Fruity fish": an almost cubistic mix of colors and surfaces where the viewer is served fish and fruit. But that is where every comparison with those other artists stops. Because Iris paints as she can. Quirky. Uncomplicated. Recognizable. Colorful. Sensory too. Her figures have big eyes that look right to the viewer: Astonished and above all accessible and friendly. Her figures taste really; the clear mouths testify to this. And Iris shows that her people have a nose to smell. The sense of touch is prominently present in the long fingers and the striking toes.

When Iris talks about her work while she is standing in front of a painting, I can not escape the weather report that enters our living rooms via the t.v: generous arm gestures accompany her explanations of the paintings. but instead of exaggerating showers, sunny periods and chance of precipitation, Iris talks about stratification, structure and composition. The spectator must unfortunately miss that.

Iris Slock lives and works in Venlo and you will not experience her "weather-related" statements. Her paintings invite the viewer to come up with a story themselves. The viewer gets all the space for the fantasy, as she herself also bears witness to a broad imagination that is her source for the paintings. Iris paints like a poet makes poems. From the first line she takes you and takes you through the rest of her "poem". Or not, because just as with poems, you run the risk of your perception becoming the poem. But then the fun of the title always remains. How about: "Some people dream of success while others get up and work hard".
Her work roams through exhibitions around the world, Germany, Italy, France, California. Have fun with the viewing.

Leo van der Hum, 2005.

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"... In clear lines and warm tones - in her own unique way - Iris puts her figures on canvas, in which the different limbs often run through each other in an almost abstract way, as if confusion and clarity were created at the same time. As a result, the whole comes across as imaginative, sympathetic and original: as an imagination of creatures that you will never meet in reality, but do not seem strange at all. The person considered or considering is very important to Iris; and where man is used as a model, it is deformed and surrounded by birds, fishes or other symbols of freedom to express in her own visual language - through form, color and content - her love and respect for man and his environment. . "

Sabine Keijzer, 1995 The Roosendaaler

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Part of opening talk for my first solo exhibition in gallery Esprit in Clinge, 1991.

Iris Slock.

When an artist is still young, graduated from the art academy a few months ago, so have not had so many opportunities to exhibit, people want to know who that person is. Now then.

Iris was born in Ossenisse, I estimate about fifteen kilometers from here, from where she moved with her parents to West-Brabant. ......... (He then tells about courses that I have had, I took them out because otherwise it would be very long) ....…Except in the visual arts, Iris also find her way in African dance art, which regularly appears in her work as a theme. In doing so, she wants to know the ritual backgrounds from which the native African dances derive their form and meaning. She actively participates in dancing with an African group and she collaborates as a designer of an African cultural magazine that carries on the cover the image of a painting of Iris.
 

"In her dealings, Iris is agile, likes to laugh, loves comic situations, is full of zest for life, must always have people around her, but when she is painting, she seems to be sitting on a work island between a gigantic mess with her workpiece: amidst paint, brushes, palette knives: drawings and paintings, which she can not miss a day: but also with a large dose of inspiration as she shows here.

The work: During her study Iris naturally learned, practiced and acquired all the techniques of two-dimensional art and here at the exhibition we can now see most of you probably for the first time. HOW she paints, draws. .... draws without and with color, so that the boundary between painting and drawing is sometimes not sharp, but we can mainly experience how - even during a relatively short period of working - honest, individual forms and despite the limitation in the use of colors has developed a rich and varied palette, so that the - let's call it "Iris hand" is clearly present in every work.

In the themes, Iris clearly conveys her vision on people. For this she uses, as she herself says, "primordialisms", primal forms and primordial colors that belong to the intuition of primitive cultural peoples in which they have humor and desires, dreams and fears, the joy of the smallest things of life and the concern for a healthy nature, knows how to interpret the incomprehensible, mysterious and ineffable.That, therefore, the human being in Iris' work is central to this has been made clear, I think.

"Iris does not make it easy with her conception of art, nor through the use of the great themes that want to tell about a purely human existence without frills, nor by looking for and developing a strong personal and individual style, that she has developed through contemporary art movements, starting from the model around and from where she composes her personal world of experience, fairy-tale one time, tragically sometimes, or hard and sharply critical in the next. deforming and subordinating what she wants seems clear to me, because color, form and content must lead to expression in her own visual language ".

The work of Iris is fascinating because of the personal, powerful qualities and atmosphere and enables everyone to test their own experiences on canvas or paper.
 

None of the drawings or paintings is a narrative, rather a piece of poetry that could be given as a title: "Just look, it does not say what it says on the canvas!"
 

To illustrate that title, for example, here is the cut-out drawing of the African woman who is busy with the laundry and on which, against a lot of white in the background, the immense tropical nature is not shown, but is present.

Or see the drawing of Peer on the back, printed on the right and on the back of your invitation; where the essential part of the head is omitted, which therefore seems cleaved, reflects the hopeless situation of man on the edge of our rich society-poignant-right-view.

Iris, congratulations with this many and beautiful work and I wish you ... etc.

Martin van den Hoogenhoff, art critic of the Brabants Nieuwsblad, 7 June 1991