Painter Laurens Stok (Ridderkerk, 1983) lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied at HKU Fine Art and de Ateliers, Amsterdam. At Daily Practice he shows recent paintings

Laurens Stok is looking for an everyday occasion, such as the water of the river Schie near his studio, to find a simple grid that serves as starting point for a painting. To release himself from the oppressions of the age-old painting tradition, he builds in a further restriction, which gives him a system for the color itself: The choice of the bold colors of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and key), the basic colors that are used with printing inks. From this clear demarcation one could conclude that Laurens Stok paints from a strictly formal act, but the works on GO FIGURE show precisely the maximum freedom that he strives for: Paintings that certainly refer to the possibilities of painting itself, but also fan out to the agility and the use of contours in comics, the hallucinatory tracksuits and brightly colored pills of the gabber scene from the 1990s.

The work of Laurens Stok was made possible with financial support from CBK Rotterdam