Chono |
| DK-Copenhagen |
| [email protected] |
Welcome to the creative space of the Danish Copenhagen-based artist Chono. At chono.com, you can experience the artwork of Chono in many forms, such as paintings, drawings, music, writing, and much more.
Chono is a Danish artist, born and raised in the designed industrialised concrete town of Avedoere Stationsby, a suburb of Copenhagen – which since the 1970s, has been a multicultural intersection of the working class, immigration, and social abuse and challenges in conflict with itself.
He is associated with the urban Neo-Expressionist movement, and his work reacts against conceptual art by returning to figurative ideas and techniques from the past. Contemporary cultures influence his work, most strongly that of emotional neglect, abuse, existential- and authoritarian thinking in the 21 first century.
Chono's paintings are mostly painted on linen, canvas, wood, or physical objects, using a broad array of paint, and coloring material, ranging from markers, aerosol, oil paint, oil sticks, and acrylic painting.
The visual artwork of Chono is usually passive-aggressive in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colors. For the most part, Chono's drawings and paintings mix neo-expressionism, figurative art, and late modernist or early postmodern and transavantgarde. His inspiration comes from a combination of childhood emotional experiences and everyday observations in the life of humans in urban and sub-cultural environments. His art is a reaction against emotional blindness and conceptual art.
Chono isn't a fan of interviews, and on the rare occasions he gives one, the responses are often brief—even cryptic. Despite this, the painter's words reveal a glimpse into the artist's inspirations and processes. They offer a window into the approach, in which Chono remixes references from history, the streets of the 1980s and 1990s metropolises and suburbs of Copenhagen, and the tumult of jazz and sub-pop culture with his identity as a young, rootless boy.
The everyday observations on the streets are Chono's classroom. Although the work of Chono is spontaneous and vibrant, his work is also profoundly thoughtful—the product of observing the world and the people around him. When asked how he depicts these observations in his artwork, Chono says: "I don't think about art while I work; I try to think about life, how not to obey the orders of the mind on structure and balance."
While Chono never received a formal art education, he is a student of art, cultural impressionism, and established as well as street art from a young age. Growing up in Avedøre Stationsby in a family- and community of artists and political activists, he would, on a daily base, be part of the Copenhagen art scene and political movements and protests. As he grew older, Chono didn't take well to traditional education, moving from school to school, from public schools to boarding schools, until finally dropping out in his senior year of High School. Instead, he preferred to observe and experience life: "I never went to art school, I just looked at many things, and that's how I learn about art and life in general, by looking at it."