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Category: Visual Art

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Clockwork Angels: The Art of Masaaki Sasamoto

The glowing paintings of Masaaki Sasamoto are drenched with gold and a mellow, old-world radiance. Butterflies, fairies and other mythical creatures, girl-automatons with exposed machinery, flowers, winged seraphic beings, are common motifs in his work. The mildly serene and rather bland, flat smiles of his figures seem to have a quality that is half-deity, half-doll. Sasamoto combines traditional Japanese techniques with modern aesthetics in a unique, luminous, memorable style that evokes antiquity, a fantastical air, an atmosphere slightly surreal and wondrously airy yet rich.

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Sena Adjovi

The glowing, tender portraits of Montreal-based artist Sena Adjovi feel like poems. Softened, gently distorted and fragmented, etherealized and haloed with light, these images are like how the dead would remember their loved ones. Often fading, half-disappearing, or only partially realized, they leave an impression of warmth in our minds. The palette is usually muted yet has a lustrous quality, investing her subjects with an otherworldly aura and a subdued radiance. These graphite and oil paintings are “bathed in gloomy or comforting atmospheres [and explore] themes of alienation, loneliness, vulnerability, hope and stillness.” Yet through this ambiguousness Adjovi’s works cannot but convey a sense of belovedness and mystery around those who are depicted.

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Audrey Benjaminsen

Audrey Benjaminsen’s lovely, sweeping illustrations, with their lush, vivid colors and sinuous forms, perfectly render the haunting scenes from The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, and other Victorian classics. The clarity yet expressiveness of her imagery is felicitous to a world of specters, languishing ladies, gnarled fairies, and mythical creatures.

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Witches’ Flowers: The Art of Rosalie Lettau

The daintily dotted pencil, graphite, and digital illustrations of Rosalie Lettau are full of goats, witches, flowers, and sharp-nailed, enveloping hands. There is a grainy texture to the blacks as of careful static, as well as a poetic luminance to the whites. The themes hint at a folkloric world where witches sign compacts with the devil, where they choose armfuls of lovely flowers which obscure their faces, where youths lie down in fields dreaming of a life beyond their known boundaries, and where the witches are hunted down and hanged from trees along with their familiars. It seems as if both the witches and the witch hunters come from the same seemingly peaceful place, a place where maidens either slowly dream their lives away, or turn to the occult arts. Each subject is a rustic figure in a mythical village, a sleeping village that presents both its light, wistful face, and its dark, mysterious, and demonic face. The darkness resides in the persecution and death of witches, even more so than in the maiden-witches’ tokens to Satan.

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The Night Forests of Tuesday Riddell

Cocoons, snails, snakes, birds, and insects populate the still yet intensely alive nightscapes of Tuesday Riddell. There is a glow in her works depicting the nocturnal life, death, and decay of forest creatures. She uses the long-lost technique of japanning in her delicate works, also often incorporating gold leaf and silver powder. This imparts the ghostly, ethereal feel to the illuminated plants and animals against their velvety black backgrounds. Riddell is inspired by Sottobosco painting, a 17th-century subgenre of still lifes which explored the forest floor and creatures of the undergrowth. The lovely little foxgloves, the sinuous ferns and stems and branches, all exude a subdued, almost phosphorescent light – the lustrous quality of her scenes conveys a sense of the mystery of nature in all its renewals and depredations. All this serves to create a unique effect which makes her lacquered and gold-pigmented paintings immediately recognizable, an impression of stillness teeming with slightly sinister life, as well as a certain flatness which is intriguing and evocative of historical art.

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Laura Makabresku

The nostalgic, saturated, slightly grainy photography of Laura Makabresku calls to mind the highly tactile quality of vintage snapshots and the beautifully composed splendor of Andrei Tarkovsky vignettes. Ordinary yet marvelous household objects, teapots, vases of wildflowers, religious items, candleholders, a bowl of strawberries – a room, steeped in honeyed, sweetly melancholy and golden light, from which the warmth of a remembered family member has just been withdrawn: all these well-worn fragments of a life add up to the ineluctable magic of the beloved everyday. They are visions of a lost yet imperishable past seen through the magnifying haze of memory.

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Nikolay Tolmachev

The delicate watercolors of Nikolay Tolmachev are playful, irreverent, and surreal. Taking themes from mythology such as Leda and the swan, as well as classical painting, Tolmachev creates juxtapositions that partake of the humorously absurd as well as the fragilely beautiful. He depicts limpid-eyed boys and girls with milk-white flesh, birds, angels, and flowers. With a largely pink, white, and red palette of flesh-and-blood tones, the exquisite mottling of colors which gives such a realism and also often lends a rosy flush to the subjects, has a tenderness that contrasts with the sometimes crude concepts of the images. These paintings are a bit eerie and unnerving, as well as wonderfully lovely and light. The ironic eroticism in his work seems to comment upon the lost (or perhaps never-existent) innocence of youth, the entanglements of romantic relationships, ties that bind, metamorphoses.

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The Writhing Anatomy of Melancholy: Artwork by Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik’s intricate drawings and paintings imaginatively fuse animal and plant life in order to explore inner worlds. Organic decay, exposed anatomy, unnatural amalgamations of natural entities are common features, with her signature delicate ribbony skeletons resembling grass. Sometimes the animals are wrapped around, shrouded, or embraced by a cage of the grass-like ribbons/bones. Birds emerge gruesomely from the exposed and lacerated throats of larger birds. The precisely drawn depictions of strangely hybridized, combined, distorted, multiplied, fractional creatures are wildly expressive, summoning specters of pain, beauty, and transformation. Snakes, rabbits, doves, seabirds with their merciless gaze…all are pitifully dissected and tenderly displayed, complexly mingled and interwoven, to illustrate phases of the human condition.

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