July 2025 – Necromantic

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Tender Chimera: The Art of Takuya Mitani

Takuya Mitani creates delicate, detailed paintings portraying mysterious youths in a chimerical state. Accompanied by a myriad of strange creatures, flowers, emblematic objects such as Eden-like apples, mystical and heraldic imagery, they seem surreally transforming, or merging into their noble and enigmatic accoutrements. These symbols and articles revolve around and halo the lovely, tranquil beings whose very placidity seems to belie sinister interior layers. There are birds and rabbits and horses, as well as chimerae with their fantastical hybrid forms, and the subjects, too, seem chimerical, always transfigured, metamorphosing, or, as it were, marred by a grotesque yet ethereal blending with other elements in the images. There is also a motif of angels, with arched wings indicating a strange divinity for these tender youthful beings. Meticulously drawn, complexly composed, rendered with an eye to detail and a careful realism, Mitani’s paintings with their almost pretty air are provoking and lulling, combining an intriguing, soft, otherworldly aspect with historical and surrealistic elements.

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[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] Alejandra Pizarnik

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.
All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone. {See more}

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Massillon by Charbonneau + French

This hauntingly whimsical and melancholy series in collaborative photography by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French is inspired by the life story of ancestor Zeta Eliza Woolley, “transposed through the surreal imaginings of the artists into a fairy-tale of suffering and unpredictable beauty.” Using film and traditional darkroom techniques, they explore the narrative of the life and death of Zeta in the town of Massillon, Ohio in the late 19th century. The resulting images are intensely dreamy, radiant, and sadly lovely.

I love the texture of these photographs, their poetic granular, luminous quality, and the surrealness which conveys both humor and a deep, abiding sense of sorrow. The sweeping vistas of a bleak, unforgiving beauty, the febrile impression of Gothic Americana, the symbolic depictions of the frustrating binds of a Victorian prairie existence…all of this is to me fascinating and full of a nostalgic, pensive evocativeness. These images feel informed by memory, dream, history, lore, family myth, and daydream. I also adore the name of the artists’ Website (“seven sisters asleep”).

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Mary Syring

Mary Syring is one of my favorite artists in recent years, and I have many of her prints in my home. Her very recognizable style draws inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the 1920s, Spiritualism, horror movies, folk tales, and New England Halloween aesthetics. Endearing, piquant, and elegant, Syring’s illustrations are wispy and sinuous, giving a sense of daintiness along with a mysterious, enchanted savor of ghostliness. The beautifully coifed ladies, specters, vampires, and witches that inhabit her drawings are sweet, a little bit eerie, often sapphic, and invested with the poetic aesthetics of bygone eras. Candles, graceful little hands, ectoplasm, scythes and winged hourglasses are recurring elements in her work. The pretty demureness of Syring’s diminutive figures juxtaposes with the themes of death, passion, mourning, horror, and the supernatural. I love the ornate vignettes full of flowers which frame some of her images; they embellish them in such an interesting and lovely way.

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