Socmplxd

Socmplxd is a multidisciplinary artist working across commercial illustration, film-world production, and digital art. Living on the West coast, his surroundings are shaping his artistic concepts – going for long walks and detours to work to be inspired. The ‘mundane’ is a source for him, focussing attention on ordinary subjects like food, domestic objects, screen-life details, work spaces, displays, and trash.

If the work feels calm at first glance, that’s because the feeling is engineered by the artist, with composition-building being central to his method. He describes constructing an image like “solving a puzzle”: moving, arranging, and fitting shapes until they resolve into something cohesive. That puzzle-logic is what gives the work its characteristic crispness and calmness. The balance he tries to keep: abstraction versus representation, and the ‘accuracy’ of digital tools versus the felt imperfections of the human hand drawing shapes on a screen.

Socmplxd’s language can be described as a form of ‘digital realism’, but it is less about mimicking photography than about composing it: simplifying objects to their core shapes while keeping their recognisability intact, and building scenes through measured placement, light, surrounding objects and negative space. His background in the film industry as a set designer is a useful key here, because the images behave like sets: they are staged, lit, and paced so the viewer’s gaze moves through them as if through a constructed room.

Socmplxd’s practice, then, is less about ‘making objects look cool’ than about re-training the eye on what’s already around us – ordinary life, newly lit. And in a visual economy where images often arrive pre-chewed, his work insists on something slower: the satisfaction of clarity, the pleasure of arrangement, and the possibility that still life – historically a genre of surfaces, symbols, and small luxuries – can be rebooted as a contemporary language for attention itself.