Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2012
Edition: Unique
Size: Large
Dimension: 139 x 207 cm | 54.7 x 81.5 in
Number of stitches: over 7 mio
Thread length: over 84 km | over 52.2 mi
Thread colours: 35
Development: over 1400 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
Sicoe’s Zenn is a vision of our state of being. A meditation. We humans are creatures with feet firmly on the ground and heads turned towards the universe. We all move around the velvety secret – the core that binds and fulfils us. Is it a mere inhale-and-exhale, a thought, nothing? Pass the nature and animals, we flee as ghosts, nothing touches us. Moments of coexistence with nature and animals, of breathing the same air with them, moments of tranquillity and simple existence are rare. The embroidery is an infinite moment of coexistence; standing in front of it, means we are there – at the finish line. Calm and alive we gaze into radiating colours, and we simply breathe and are happy. Bon voyage, Zenn.
The artwork glows in its own inner light, as if it were alive – a subtle choice of thread colours and techniques made a perfect emphasis on the symmetry within the randomness. A century old embroidery technique of chain stitch lays the groundwork, while modern interweaving Ercigoj stitch technique brings in life, and the selection of especially vivid threads accentuates details which allow the artwork to truly shine.
About the artist
»Colour often shows the way; in the painting of Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe, it is a building block of unbounded expressiveness. Intense and varied, employed along the principle of more is more and never too much, it challenges a viewer to explore boundaries between expressiveness of colour and responsiveness of light in every work. The eruption of colours and the intensity of light combine in a rhythm of images that the artist carefully and deliberately arranges in space, despite their apparent ease, humour, playfulness, and even jocularity.« (Sarival Sosić)
Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe was born in 1965 in Ljubljana. He has graduated at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where he earned master’s degrees in painting and graphic art. He also took advanced courses at the Minerva Academy in Groningen in The Netherlands. He works as a free-lance artist in Ljubljana.
Features
Extra big formats
The main problem of big format embroideries are material contractions that make it difficult to correctly position all the details of a motif. To overcome such deformations and other problems, over decades of creating big embroideries, we have developed technical and software solutions that enable us to deliver perfect embroideries of any dimensions and number of stitches.
Extraordinary number of stitches
In a classic embroidery, the number of stitches is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000, and is limited by stretching and contracting of materials. By overcoming this limitations, we are able to make embroideries with millions of stitches which enables us to produce photorealistic embroideries and recreate any painting of any artistic style.
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.