Finding the art in the beautiful game

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — In the 102nd minute of his team’s epic World Cup match against soccer powerhouse Argentina, with viewers around the globe hanging on every moment, the Cape Verde fullback Sidny Lopes Cabral unloaded a shot that curled all the way into the back of the Argentine net and sprinted into the stands to find his girlfriend, Jayley da Cruz. The image of their embrace quickly went viral, which was when LJ Rader knew he had to get to work.

“Regardless of whether or not Cape Verde was going to win that match, that was the image that would summarize that game,” he said.

Rader is the person behind the wildly popular Art But Make It Sports social media accounts, where he uses photographs and screengrabs of pivotal or dynamic moments in sports and juxtaposes them against canonical paintings or statues. Earlier this year, Rader released a book that includes some of his best-known posts, such as a side-by-side contrast of a 1999 photograph of US Women’s National Team soccer star Brandi Chastain’s shirtless celebration and a 12th century sculpture of a kneeling female deity on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He’s been working overtime during the FIFA World Cup as he gets tagged by social media users in hundreds of images from different matches and rushes off to find their perfect fine art pairings. Sometimes the associations come to him immediately, as when he saw a photograph of English midfielder Jude Bellingham score on a header, where he looked just like a Sibylle Bergemann photo of a statue of Friedrich Engels being lifted into place in East Berlin. “I had just been waiting for the day where a player went completely horizontal to use it,” Rader said.

The art and sports afficionado talked about how he’s applied his process to the World Cup, what compositional challenges soccer presents, and what his newly global cohort of followers has to say.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What’s different about soccer compared to other sports in this whole process?

On a day-to-day level, soccer tends to be harder just because there are only so many positions they can be, since can’t use their hands. Football is hard because you can’t see faces, but there are more people and more movement, so it kind of balances out and ends up becoming easier. Basketball is probably the easiest, just because players are always jumping and fighting, all the limbs are moving around, and there tends to be a lot of image variety.

But with the World Cup, everybody is dialed into the same event. The community is constantly sending me things, and there are photographers from everywhere. It ends up getting easier because there’s so much to work with.

Were you preparing for the World Cup to be a busy season for you?

Yeah, the summer is usually quiet across other sports. You’ve got the WNBA and baseball, and there’s Wimbledon. But the tournament draws so much attention that it just becomes World Cup season for everybody. I’m a big WNBA fan, and even my attention is definitely focused on the World Cup.

How quickly do you move when you get a photograph and can match it to something effective? Or is it more about rifling through and sifting through images until you find the match?

Each scenario is unique, but they all fit within the same framework. The ideal is getting a sports photo, rather than a screenshot, and pairing it with the best possible artwork. If you looked at my drafts folder, there’s probably a lot that people might find interesting, but it didn’t quite meet the editorial bar I’ve set for myself.

With the World Cup, because there are so many photographers, I might see an image and think, “I’d love the frame one or two seconds after this, because the hand might be in a different position.” Sometimes I’ll talk to photographers to see what they have. That rarely happens outside big events. If it’s a screenshot and I know what I want to pair it with, I might go back to the video and look a few frames before or after to get an arm or another detail in a better position.

There was one from Spain–Portugal in Dallas, with [Spanish defensive midfielder] Rodri and [Portuguese midfielder] Bernardo Silva, where one of them was taunting the other. They’re former teammates, so I knew it would be interesting to look at. All I could find was the angle from behind. I had artwork I wanted to pair with it if I could get the angle from the front because the face mattered. I didn’t end up getting the exact shot I wanted, so it wasn’t ideal, but I’m trying to find the best angle based on what’s available.

It can be knowing an exact artwork or just recognizing an artist’s style. One I posted from the Argentina–Egypt match was from a viral overhead photo, but I didn’t know exactly what it would pair with at first. I had something that could have worked from Fernand Léger but didn’t quite meet the bar. So, I started thinking through what else it could be. Hans Hoffman does a lot of colors and features green a lot more than Léger. He does mismatched shapes. The shapes are colorful, they’re on top of colors. He does a lot of squares, but also just sort of like amorphous shapes. The background itself reminded me a lot of his brush stroke style. You’ll once in a while get with him like some circular, which I wanted to capture at the ball. I played around with it for a while and found the right painting eventually.

The two I was most fascinated by were how closely the photo of Lopes Cabral after he scored and found his girlfriend, and then the one from the Egypt–Australia game. Two very different references with Renoir and Kandinksy. How do you switch so quickly between more romantic art and modern art?

It might be a little subconscious, but I have a mental library of art I know and reference. I probably reference abstract art just as much as Renaissance art these days.

With the Lopes Cabral image, there are tons and tons of pieces of a man and woman embracing with their heads next to each other. It’s a lot rarer to get a figure looking at the viewer unless it’s a portrait. I could have chosen many other embrace paintings, but the Renoir one was great because she’s looking at you. Lopes Cabral’s girlfriend’s phone matches the woman’s fan.

With the Egypt–Australia image, when I saw the photo, I thought it looked like Kandinsky. He does straight lines and circular lines, and he has a similar red-and-yellow color scheme. I had mentally banked two different Kandinsky paintings, including the one I ended up using. I spent a long time trying to get the crop right and line up the black line. It was cool because the red in the painting is leaking out, while the yellow is static and contained like the scene on the field. That one was fun because it wasn’t a painting I had seen in real life as well.

Were you watching the Cape Verde-Argentina match live?

Yeah.

Did you know that was probably going to be something you would make a post about?

There was so much happening in that game. But when they showed that on screen, or when I saw it come through because so many people were tagging me in it, I knew. With soccer, the celebrations tend to be easier because players are always doing different things. The on-field play can be harder, but celebrations give you more variety.

Is there anything different about soccer fans you interact with on social media compared with fans from other sports?

I’ve gotten a lot of comments from international fans who may be new to the account. They’ll say, “You did this — how come you didn’t do my team?” And it’s like, this is not my full-time job. I can only do so much, and it’s nothing against your team or your country.

There’s a lot of passion, which is great. I love the tweets that come across the timeline in other languages. Sometimes you see something auto-translated and it’s like, “Oh my god, this is unhinged.” It’s great.

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