Ian Ferguson/Hydeon creates fascinating, lurid, elaborately vivid artworks depicting group scenes and vignettes from decadent, fantastic civilizations. Striking black and red predominate among bold and vibrant colors, like slashes in the face. The rather flat perspectives and characterizations of the individual faces are reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance paintings. The strange composition and techniques serve to give his work its utterly unique feeling, also its sinister yet alluring air.
Naive and sumptuous at the same time, his mixed-media drawings parade a multitude of masked perverse figures in a claustrophobic world of morbid and lavish imagery. The color is so intense that it draws the viewer irresistibly into these complex tableaux, as if one could become lost in them, in this place and time of a past that never quite existed, a princely realm that never was, but is rather an inventive amalgamation of many, as well as a starkly new imagining.
Hydeon states that his arrestingly imaginative work is inspired by “ancient civilizations, Baroque, Gothic, and Victorian-era architectural movements, medieval, folk, and outsider art, ancient myths, fairy tales, and ideas of consciousness.” Many of Hydeon’s works are available at the Mortal Machine Gallery in New Orleans, including the second one shown below, Losing at Backgammon.
