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Month: February 2020

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Lamb of the Future: The Photography of Alexander Berdin-Lazursky

The crisply elegant photography of Alexander Berdin-Lazursky is impressive, impeccable, and extremely beautiful. It has a flawless hyperrealism which is haunting and masterful. His photographic series resemble portraits of a latter-day Joan of Arc, an astronaut-saint, an assassinated queen… Black-cowled ethereal women are haloed by hand-drawn golden symbols and drenched in a colorful austerity as lovely as it is precise. He also has a wonderful talent for graphic design, as evidenced by his layouts for the tarot card series below.

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Pastel Fever Dreams of Alice Lin

The magical strangeness of Beijing-based artist Alice Lin’s watercolor paintings on silk and rice paper transports me to a realm of childhood nightmare. A profusion of friendly colors beckon, fanciful and bizarre animal characters are vignetted, gigantic mushrooms with the lush definition of their gilled stems fascinate the eye with a slight sickishness, the texture so alluring yet indefinably disturbing… The whimsy and placid vertigo of her works reveals a massed and intertwined array of sea, flowers, buttons, fruit, birds and other fauna. I love the idea portrayed by the odd, faceless beings seeming to exchange thoughts through a torrential vortex of flowers. Lin says, “This new and fascinating wonderland of possible realities combines with the human figure, plants, animals into a singular, calm, dark vision.” Her storybook delirium is full of richness and a sense of movement, of swirling florescence and bright fluidity.

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Three-Dimensional Saints and Memento Mori by Billelis

Billy Bogiatzoglou of Billelis combines a sense of the historic with the religious and occult in his 3D illustrations, which are so realistically rendered that they could be mistaken at first for sculptures. These baroque and gilded skeletons, saints, and Virgins are elaborately encrusted with an opulence on a grand scale reminiscent of the golden and lavishly bejeweled trappings of the catacomb saints.

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Wakeling: The Art of Magda Boreysza

New Orleans-based artist Magda Boreysza takes inspiration from nature, mythology, folk tales, and medieval painting. Her drawings and poetic comic strips express innocence and transformation with a precise yet free tenderness of style. Her artist statement on her Website reads, “I look forward to a world where trees grow and shatter the cities, and we can finally all be creatures together.” The fairytale tangling of lost child and vulpine beast, tree and comet, hair and sea, serves to create an atmosphere of endearing surreality.

The naive faces of the beings who inhabit her worlds, surrounding each other in wave-like masses like melancholy homunculi, resemble those of children who are feral but ethereal and fragile. They are attended and surrounded by, often intertwining with strange and sweet animals which are the harbingers of metamorphoses internal as well as external. Boreysza describes her art as telling “stories of a world filled with mysterious creatures: animals with human faces and wild children, who wander a vast, dreamlike forest, both dark and innocent, gentle and violent.”

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Without Love – Alice Glass

This is the nostalgically colorful and enchanting music video for “Without Love” by Alice Glass (formerly of Crystal Castles), directed by the enormously talented Floria Sigismondi. Among others, Sigismondi has also directed the music videos for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” The White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid,” and Sigur Rós’ “Untitled.” Her video work is consistently lyrical, beautifully vivid, and unforgettable. I have also long admired her photography, a few examples of which are below.

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The Purple Crucifixion: Photography by Casstronaut

The hyper-saturated photographic works of Casstronaut/Cassie Meder remind me of crystalline pomegranates. Brittle and glossy, there is a proliferation of vivid, sharp, bright reds, purples, and blues, highlighting the fleshy texture of lilies and ruby-crystal blood, creating an atmosphere of visual opulence. She plays with crispness versus haze, doubling and super-imposition, in her renderings of Catholic themes including stigmata, paraphernalia of the church and liturgical rites, the dominion of death, and vanitas. This vibrantly hued modernity contrasts with the somber and antique subject matter depicted. Her photographs of venerable old cathedrals are also lushly gorgeous.

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