Soren Hope’s (Yale MFA ’23) enormous works hold tensions and contradictions together without sagging in the middle. They are both “invested in the specificity of observed material reality, and paint[ing] the body with reverence” while simultaneously depicting “the body as a site of uncertainty”—a place of disarray, interruption, and fallible embodiment.
Two figures, each contained within their own canvases, face each other, a boundary between them delineated by the corner of the room. The figures are anonymized, faces hidden, and recognizable only if you are intimately familiar with the torsos.
At left, Parasympathy presents a slick, larger-than-life, yellow-orange person—hunched over, face turned towards the earth, chest folding into stomach. One outstretched hand loosely grasps a buttery glob. It’s a work buttressed by contrasts: three legs and a singular foot expressed by long, broad, visibly streaky brush strokes while the crease of the torso is rendered with careful, attentive shading. The space to the left of the figure is filled with swooping washy lines, while the two boots are detailed with shadows that imply a three-dimensional space. One arm dissolves at the bicep into a pale purple tentacle while the other’s round, supple forearm protrudes from a simplified bicep.
At right, slivers of pale yellow peer through the blues and ghostly greens of Autonom-nom-nomic System. If Parasympathy is composed of contrasts, Autonom-nom-nomic System is a work of palimpsest. A cerulean figure hunches over at center, a near-mirror of Parasympathy, but here, breasts hang heavy over the stomach, and one arm dangles limply by their side. Their knees knock together; one foot is bare, the other wears a dark sock. The other arm—or calf? or collection of oblong spectral shapes?—is merely a suggestion. To the right, a tangled mass of leaf-like shapes obscure something barely visible as two lower legs with blue shoes, peek out from underneath. In the bottom left, a pastel yellow shape implies the back of a sitting torso or the tops of two bent knees—a detailed foot and curved forearm and hand protrude from the shape’s side.
Both works begin with an initial sweeping movement and a blinking in and out of comprehension; they require a slow unpacking. Each layer of Autonom-nom-nomic System is ambiguous enough that there is not a single answer for what’s being represented, but purposeful enough to indicate there is something there to keep poking at—to attempt to understand, even if it will be impossible to completely decipher.
Hope’s works show an intuitive familiarity with the human figure. They started mostly by drawing faces and figures from observation, encouraged by their father, a liturgical artist and cabinet maker, and their mother, a visual artist and Yale Painting and Printmaking MFA ‘98. While Hope’s art holds a deep reverence for the real, embodied figure, Hope also describes drawing as a way to “loosen the idea of a thing.” This simultaneous reverence and detachment allows them to depict the human body as constantly being created, re-composed, and suspended without being relinquished. Despite being able to easily distinguish each individual mark or brushstroke that makes up the figures, their bodily weight is still convincing. The people are recognizable but not easily understood.
“I’m interested in flipping between what is wholly recognizable as bodies and the dream world of double meanings and incidental resemblances,” Hope explains. They want to probe the stability and reliability of perception and resemblance—as an individual construction rather than neutral fact.
Sleepwalkers were the core idea that ballooned into Autonom-nom-nomic System. Hope was drawn to “the non-givenness of coherence” represented by sleepwalkers. Sleepwalkers provide an opportunity to investigate moments when existing in a body also means enduring the “interruptions” and the “partial or incomplete gestures” that come with it.
Their interest in the “tangents, echos, stutters” of embodiment is reflected not just by the subject matter, but also in their manner of painting. Oil painting allows for building up layers of underpainting, and Hope says an important part of their process is to “react” to the underlayers, and allowing for “incidental underpainting to show through the gestures painted over them.”
Only the heaviness of Hope’s depiction of the body and space allows the ideas of disorientation and ambiguity to be read clearly. Figures, limbs, faces, torsos, and the ground constantly dissolve, merge, and emerge: a streak of paint stretching into a face, a line suggesting a calf. Yet Hope gives viewers some anchor points; the top left of Autonom-nom-nomic System contains a dark space with clear lines cutting through a pale blue-yellow. When I tell them I saw it as the top of a city wall with a horizon beyond it, they laugh and say they saw it as the corner of a bookshelf with a leg stretching into negative space. Both of those feel simultaneously wrong and right. Hope says they wanted to have “things that were thing-like” in response to the leaves’ on the opposite side.
Many of Hope’s other works show a similar interest in exploring the trust of being able to understand a painted figure as a coherent self. Tumbleweed centers around a mass of dog fur and grass, which almost gains coherency as two dogs rolling around in grass before breaking down into an indiscernible bundle of textures. Long Enough to Reach the Ground depicts several “horses,” or caricature horse masks and horse-fur-colored sheets draped over two humans.
Hope explains that for them, sleepwalkers were a sort of inversion of the costumes in Long Enough to Reach the Ground because of the lack of intentionality and vulnerability of sleepwalking—and the potential embarrassment or horror at accidentally seeing someone’s body stripped of agency versus the overt humor of choosing to dress in horse costumes. The works pose perpendicular questions, serving as a reminder that despite our agency, bodily alienation can bubble up at any time. Hope describes the body as “the thing we know most intimately, but in some ways, don’t know at all.”
In their studio, three small wood squares are filled with three faces, cropped close so there is only a sliver of their hair visible on either side of their cheeks. Hope reveals they are paintings of their doppelgangers.
Painting doppelgangers was their way of working through the confusion of existing as a person who resembles others. They argue that both painting and living are fundamentally acts of mimicry—painting trafficks in the creation of resemblances, while living is learned performance of coherence where one adopts ways of presenting the self from observing others. This performance of coherence further distances the body as an unfamiliar object.
Hope’s works are united by their questions of bodily legibility and the alienation involved in relating to a physical body at all. Rather than rendering the weirdness and interruptions of embodiment peripheral, Hope’s works center around them. Their personal investment in these questions are manifold. Hope tells me that they have experienced occasional simple partial seizure episodes since they were sixteen. For them, it manifests as experiencing deja vu and vertigo for whole days. The seizures are not dangerous or painful, but Hope describes them as a “rupture” in their selfhood, where they experience a “depersonalization” and “flickering of coherence.”
Their works rely on uncertainty, and through it, viewers can find a kernel of whatever we might call meaning or truth—not as something static, but something that must be sustained through our own efforts. The surreal scenes in Parasympathy and Autonom-nom-nomic System open a different plane for understanding how we perceive other bodies, relate to our own, and occupy external spaces.
Hope’s ambiguous brushy shapes and spectral layers allow for what they refer to as “a sort of psychoanalytic slip of the tongue, or the expression of the unconscious in the visual form.” Their works demand that the viewers project themselves into what they are seeing—a demand to take up the work for themselves—again and again and again.
Soren Hope’s (Yale MFA ’23) enormous works hold tensions and contradictions together without sagging in the middle. They are both “invested in the specificity of observed material reality, and paint[ing] the body with reverence” while simultaneously depicting “the body as a site of uncertainty”—a place of disarray, interruption, and fallible embodiment.
Two figures, each contained within their own canvases, face each other, a boundary between them delineated by the corner of the room. The figures are anonymized, faces hidden, and recognizable only if you are intimately familiar with the torsos.
At left, Parasympathy presents a slick, larger-than-life, yellow-orange person—hunched over, face turned towards the earth, chest folding into stomach. One outstretched hand loosely grasps a buttery glob. It’s a work buttressed by contrasts: three legs and a singular foot expressed by long, broad, visibly streaky brush strokes while the crease of the torso is rendered with careful, attentive shading. The space to the left of the figure is filled with swooping washy lines, while the two boots are detailed with shadows that imply a three-dimensional space. One arm dissolves at the bicep into a pale purple tentacle while the other’s round, supple forearm protrudes from a simplified bicep.
At right, slivers of pale yellow peer through the blues and ghostly greens of Autonom-nom-nomic System. If Parasympathy is composed of contrasts, Autonom-nom-nomic System is a work of palimpsest. A cerulean figure hunches over at center, a near-mirror of Parasympathy, but here, breasts hang heavy over the stomach, and one arm dangles limply by their side. Their knees knock together; one foot is bare, the other wears a dark sock. The other arm—or calf? or collection of oblong spectral shapes?—is merely a suggestion. To the right, a tangled mass of leaf-like shapes obscure something barely visible as two lower legs with blue shoes, peek out from underneath. In the bottom left, a pastel yellow shape implies the back of a sitting torso or the tops of two bent knees—a detailed foot and curved forearm and hand protrude from the shape’s side.
Both works begin with an initial sweeping movement and a blinking in and out of comprehension; they require a slow unpacking. Each layer of Autonom-nom-nomic System is ambiguous enough that there is not a single answer for what’s being represented, but purposeful enough to indicate there is something there to keep poking at—to attempt to understand, even if it will be impossible to completely decipher.
Hope’s works show an intuitive familiarity with the human figure. They started mostly by drawing faces and figures from observation, encouraged by their father, a liturgical artist and cabinet maker, and their mother, a visual artist and Yale Painting and Printmaking MFA ‘98. While Hope’s art holds a deep reverence for the real, embodied figure, Hope also describes drawing as a way to “loosen the idea of a thing.” This simultaneous reverence and detachment allows them to depict the human body as constantly being created, re-composed, and suspended without being relinquished. Despite being able to easily distinguish each individual mark or brushstroke that makes up the figures, their bodily weight is still convincing. The people are recognizable but not easily understood.
“I’m interested in flipping between what is wholly recognizable as bodies and the dream world of double meanings and incidental resemblances,” Hope explains. They want to probe the stability and reliability of perception and resemblance—as an individual construction rather than neutral fact.
Sleepwalkers were the core idea that ballooned into Autonom-nom-nomic System. Hope was drawn to “the non-givenness of coherence” represented by sleepwalkers. Sleepwalkers provide an opportunity to investigate moments when existing in a body also means enduring the “interruptions” and the “partial or incomplete gestures” that come with it.
Their interest in the “tangents, echos, stutters” of embodiment is reflected not just by the subject matter, but also in their manner of painting. Oil painting allows for building up layers of underpainting, and Hope says an important part of their process is to “react” to the underlayers, and allowing for “incidental underpainting to show through the gestures painted over them.”
Only the heaviness of Hope’s depiction of the body and space allows the ideas of disorientation and ambiguity to be read clearly. Figures, limbs, faces, torsos, and the ground constantly dissolve, merge, and emerge: a streak of paint stretching into a face, a line suggesting a calf. Yet Hope gives viewers some anchor points; the top left of Autonom-nom-nomic System contains a dark space with clear lines cutting through a pale blue-yellow. When I tell them I saw it as the top of a city wall with a horizon beyond it, they laugh and say they saw it as the corner of a bookshelf with a leg stretching into negative space. Both of those feel simultaneously wrong and right. Hope says they wanted to have “things that were thing-like” in response to the leaves’ on the opposite side.
Many of Hope’s other works show a similar interest in exploring the trust of being able to understand a painted figure as a coherent self. Tumbleweed centers around a mass of dog fur and grass, which almost gains coherency as two dogs rolling around in grass before breaking down into an indiscernible bundle of textures. Long Enough to Reach the Ground depicts several “horses,” or caricature horse masks and horse-fur-colored sheets draped over two humans.
Hope explains that for them, sleepwalkers were a sort of inversion of the costumes in Long Enough to Reach the Ground because of the lack of intentionality and vulnerability of sleepwalking—and the potential embarrassment or horror at accidentally seeing someone’s body stripped of agency versus the overt humor of choosing to dress in horse costumes. The works pose perpendicular questions, serving as a reminder that despite our agency, bodily alienation can bubble up at any time. Hope describes the body as “the thing we know most intimately, but in some ways, don’t know at all.”
In their studio, three small wood squares are filled with three faces, cropped close so there is only a sliver of their hair visible on either side of their cheeks. Hope reveals they are paintings of their doppelgangers.
Painting doppelgangers was their way of working through the confusion of existing as a person who resembles others. They argue that both painting and living are fundamentally acts of mimicry—painting trafficks in the creation of resemblances, while living is learned performance of coherence where one adopts ways of presenting the self from observing others. This performance of coherence further distances the body as an unfamiliar object.
Hope’s works are united by their questions of bodily legibility and the alienation involved in relating to a physical body at all. Rather than rendering the weirdness and interruptions of embodiment peripheral, Hope’s works center around them. Their personal investment in these questions are manifold. Hope tells me that they have experienced occasional simple partial seizure episodes since they were sixteen. For them, it manifests as experiencing deja vu and vertigo for whole days. The seizures are not dangerous or painful, but Hope describes them as a “rupture” in their selfhood, where they experience a “depersonalization” and “flickering of coherence.”
Their works rely on uncertainty, and through it, viewers can find a kernel of whatever we might call meaning or truth—not as something static, but something that must be sustained through our own efforts. The surreal scenes in Parasympathy and Autonom-nom-nomic System open a different plane for understanding how we perceive other bodies, relate to our own, and occupy external spaces.
Hope’s ambiguous brushy shapes and spectral layers allow for what they refer to as “a sort of psychoanalytic slip of the tongue, or the expression of the unconscious in the visual form.” Their works demand that the viewers project themselves into what they are seeing—a demand to take up the work for themselves—again and again and again.
