A Tree: A Winter Battlefield Outside Kharkiv
The protagonist of this work is a tree Soi had stumbled across in the Bergen Forest situated north of Amsterdam while in a residency at the Luceberthuis, and whose image has appeared across his works in varying formal registers.
The dune landscape of Bergen became a space for soliloquy and while walking across it one day he stumbled across this strangely shaped oak tree. Around the same time, the invasion of Ukraine was unfolding, and Soi began adding images circulating the media to his growing archive of imagery. One caught his attention; a photograph shot by the American photographer Tyler Hicks. It depicted a haunting visual of a fallen Russian soldier against a grey winter landscape, his body partially covered by the falling snow. The framing was painterly, alluding to the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828 CE) and his etchings, The Disaster of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), a series of 82 prints created between 1810 and 1820, which serve as an important reference for the artist.
Eventually, he decided to pixelate the media image and paint it as a background against which the tree is rendered in silverpoint. A circular window allows a view into a miniature world constructed by Soi, wherein he translates this image from the media, which he considers one of the landscapes we inhabit—albeit a virtual one—allowing it to become a background for the tree, which points to yet another landscape, that of the physical world in which we live. Thus different registers of figuration are sutured together in the translation of imagery from disparate sources into a personal narrative.
