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The Otherworldly and the Liminal: Art by Eric Fortune

Eric Fortune’s hauntingly beautiful, lyrical, photorealistic paintings, featuring statuesque humans or human-like mythical beings, convey a sense of movement, of epic vastness, and of illumination. The figures are often suspended in air, on the brink of falling, in motion, or reaching towards a source of light as towards some deeply powerful spiritual or inner discovery. They are always on some pinnacle; on the verge of redemption, destruction, crossing boundaries, or the threshold of immolating enlightenment.

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Short Film: “Embrio”

Embrio is an experimental short film made entirely by Jean-Sébastien Monzani (story, direction, film, and music), with acting by Stéphanie Schneider.

What draws me to Embrio is its quality of implicit horror, conveyed through the actor’s subtle, ever-changing expressions and the eerie, intense, atmospheric soundtrack. Sans a conventional narrative, Embrio explores the compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and psychological reactions of a young woman, and, though very well-composed, it also has a rawness, depicting naked sensations and emotions with all the vagueness and ambiguity of good psychological horror – all within a clean, bright, well-lit, nearly sterile environment. It draws us deeply, physically, into the experience of the woman, and gets under our skin.

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João Ruas

João Ruas is an amazing artist and illustrator based in São Paulo, Brazil. His work is gorgeous, delicate, with graceful, flowing lines (his rendering of hair is exquisite), soft surrealness, and a dreamy macabre quality; utterly recognizable as his own at a glance.

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Anatomy of Heaven: Dino Valls

Dino Valls is a Spanish painter of exquisite surreal works which explore the human psyche via the body, medical analogies, religious imagery, and sexuality. Hauntingly beautiful and photorealistic, his paintings have a sense of classicism and an incredible technical virtuosity. The subjects have a radiant, heavenly cast to their faces, reminiscent of classics by old masters and medieval religious paintings. The body is portrayed as fragmented, segmented, doubled, vivisected, deformed, and androgynous – both oddity and sacrosanct vessel. Parts of their anatomy are displaced, scores of needles adorn the ethereal figures.

These images powerfully illustrate statements about the way that the modern body is invaded, pried into, operated upon, examined, measured, and manipulated, making a commentary on the impersonal, objectifying treatment of modern medicine. There is often a disembodied hand taking hold of the subject in a possessive, invasive way, evoking the cold, clinical, authoritative touch of doctors, with sexual and sinister overtones. The surgery they perform on the people is symbolic and laden with dark, occult meanings. I love the subtly disturbing way in which Valls uses anatomical symbolism and naked human vulnerability to create these resonant images, and the way that he both perverts and glorifies the human form and spirit.

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Irina Ionesco

Irina Ionesco is a French-Romanian photographer who began exhibiting her work in the mid-1970s. Her photography is dark, dramatic, erotic, and strongly evocative of a vintage aesthetic, with lots of influence from the 1920s, reflecting the lavishly ornamental tendencies of that period, feathers, furs, headdresses, and all, with its vampish, sexy yet macabre vibe.

Irina’s images of her daughter, Eva Ionesco, were very controversial, as you can probably imagine. In these, the prepubescent Eva is displayed in an array of nude, erotic, and bondage-inspired poses, with an intense gaze, a seeming precocious knack for modeling, and a weird, Lolita-esque allure. I find these photos to be some of Ionesco’s most interesting work, however.

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“The Exorcism of…” by Anti Sweden

I love the movement in this film, the dark, wild kinetic energy. Directed by Marius Tharaldsen and modeled by Vilde Victoria Madsen, for design agency Anti’s newly launched black denim line, “Anti Sweden.” Inspired by the Norwegian “culture of darkness” and the spirit of black metal’s aesthetics.

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Chris Berens – “Leeuwenhart”

Chris Berens’ Leeuwenhart show is currently exhibiting at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle. These precious, glowing, softly translucent works have a surreal fairytale-land feel, and a unique look which comes from Berens’ singular method of using inks (as well as bistre, graphite, and parquet lacquer) on inkjet photo paper, and piecing the works together in a patchwork fashion in 1-3-inch pieces; some patches are suffused with a haze, while others are sharp to the point of photorealism. The overall effect has a lot of depth, layering, softness, and wonderfully dreamlike, gently bizarre qualities.

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