Booster Blog

"ART TAKES COURAGE"

“As artists we know how important art is not only for your eyes, but for your mind and heart as well.” 

The speaker is Jonny Aaseth, one half of ‘Broslo’ - the Oslo-based artist brothers who have become strong advocates for art as a central cruise ship experience. 

“When you are onboard a ship for long periods, you need to trigger the senses in different ways and art can help do that. If you imagine people to be the lungs of a ship, then art would be the fresh air,” Jonny explains.

Jonny and his brother Nikko started Broslo as part of a project to re-build an old factory in Oslo as a space to create works of art. Jonny recalls, “Initially we used old wood we found in the buildings we were working in, but it quickly escalated to bigger projects and then on to exhibitions of our work. Today we work with many different types of materials, but many of our pieces contains light in one way or another. It doesn’t matter if it’s LED, neon, fibre optics or just regular lightbulbs, light always gives it a little bit of extra feeling.”

Broslo has worked on a number of cruise ship projects, including two sculpture installations on the Holland America Line ship Nieuw Statendam. Nikko recalls: “Both of them were supposed to have musical themes. We ended up doing a huge ‘melting’ rock guitar that we made out of wood which we covered with Bolidt material, and we also did a grand piano infinity mirror.”

Broslo also provided artwork for four staircases on the Symphony of the Seas, including eight backlit lenticular prints plus backdrops.

 “Like most of the art we do, our cruise ship work is a mix between pop art and more abstract compositions,” says Jonny. “We always try to make every project as cool as possible regardless of what the task might be. Art for us is about spreading happiness and colours - even if the brief doesn’t necessarily say so!”

 Broslo has been working together with Bolidt for the last few years and Nikko describes it as being “a really fun ride!” He adds: “We always dreamed of a material that dried fast and was sustainable and glossy at the same time. So when we got the first batch of Bolidt we were amazed.”

The brothers’ approach often includes an ‘action painting’ element, and the fact that the end result may not be known at the start demands exceptional flexibility from the materials used. “We can truly say that some of our coolest and best known pieces are made with Bolidt materials,” says Jonny. “They really give us a new way to create something that we couldn’t have done without that type of material; so for us working with Bolidt has been important in pushing our art to the next step.”