Visual Art – Necromantic

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Spiked Relics by Laura Benson

Laura Benson is a remarkable multidisciplinary artist and jewelry-maker. Her illustrations remind me so dearly of medieval art, with their strange little creatures, demons, and religious iconography. Her work is charming, disturbing, with a sense of sacred yet accessible mystery. I love the soldered frames and little pendants holding images of strange import. Surreal and metaphorical, they are imbued with both personal and mythic meaning.

Laura is led by “numinal curiosity… Melding found materials such as wooden clock parts, old book pages, antique charms, wooden textile stamps with processes such as printmaking, spun cotton, metalcasting and soldering…I create scenes and creatures and sentiments which rely upon the compositing effect of intuitive decision-making.” She is particularly focused on “iconography from an epoch of history in which the unknown was a grand and living Thing…”

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Odd Nerdrum

There hardly needs to be any introduction to the legendary Odd Nerdrum, but I just wanted to share some of my favorite paintings by him across the decades. I love Nerdrum’s Neo-Baroque style, reminiscent of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio. His “odd” scenes take place in vast, barren post-apocalyptic spaces, bleak and inhospitable wastelands, softened and elevated by the beauty of his masterly techniques – sometimes dimly seen, with a delicate and translucent suffusing of color. His paintings express primal experiences of the human being, which appears through his lens as a kind of bizarre specimen, seeming alien, absurd, and ominous when viewed outside accepted conventions and interpretations. It is as if they were being observed for the first time, with no preconceived notions, yet with allegorical meaning that also heightens the absurdity.

The strange rituals and psychological contortions of mankind are here depicted with a harsh starkness, but beautifully rendered. His works often portray an enigmatic communal aspect, the empty landscapes dotted with strange figures who seem in some way mere repetitions of each other (as in Dawn and The Singers, where the skull-capped figures are echoed and indistinguishable), harking to some unknown call to obscure and inscrutable phases of experience. They seem to treat of shameful longings, a collective anxiety, amorphous dread, and deformities of the psyche. Nerdrum’s is a world where esoteric and perverse behavior does not seem regarded as such by villages and communities that, while appearing to exist in a post-apocalyptic realm, strongly remind one of past centuries – the sparse communities are exactly as strange and all take part in this alien particularity.

Of his post-apocalyptic works, the biography on Nerdrum’s Website states that his “steppe people live in pact with the elements. All that surrounds them is nameless and must be defined anew….Compositionally, Nerdrum adopted the inverted perspective with centralized figures inspired by 14th-century Russian icons….Perspective distortions akin to those of the Russian icons are evident in The Seed Protectors, where the horizon is curved and seen from a bird’s eye view, while the figures are seen from below.” These perspectives are fascinating, with their simultaneous conveyance of both vastness and unrealistically small focus.

Some of my favorite pieces of his are ones that seemingly take place in extraterrestrial space – “As a child he painted white, resurrecting figures on a black background based on impressions from fever dreams. These visions were now applied to big canvases….as seen in Love Divided and Volunteer in Void, where people float around small planets in an infinite void.” The celestial spaces depart from the brutality of his earthbound landscapes and give outlet to those airy, ethereal qualities that I love, those silky, vaporous, transparent shrouds or veils.

Many of his later works from the 2000s onwards possess a tragic emotional intensity, as in Daddy’s Girl. “The transitions between skin and background melt into each other, as in Five Singing Women, where the faces have become ghostly impersonal due to the hazy effect….The motifs take on an even rougher, more vibrant exterior…staged in a world where the surroundings ravage its inhabitants. The particular way of rendering of arms and legs carries the effect of painted movement – even breathing is depicted in the form of vapor escaping from the mouth… Groups of figures are depicted as one organism… After describing a primitive rebirth in desolate landscapes…it is precisely in the underworld that Nerdrum’s motifs have unfolded in recent years. From this series of paintings, figures appear without clothes and hair on their bodies, as seen in Astray, where pale old men and people in wheelchairs are wandering without aim or meaning.”

Odd Nerdrum’s endless exploration of liminal, indefinable human states has given rise to a remarkable, iconic body of work which is instantly recognizable, although varied and wide-ranging, and continues enduringly impactful and gripping as one of the most original oeuvres of the modern era.

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Naya Kotko

The fashion photography of Naya Kotko is defined by stunning contrast, bold visual impact, and gorgeous, sumptuous dark costumes. Her imagery often features knife-sharp black crescent moons, Renaissance-style swords, long demonic nails, and red or blue backgrounds against which the monochromatic clothing shows up deliciously. Elaborate headdresses as well as both romantically draped and architectural garments form the mysterious and sibylline attire of the subjects of the photographs, whose faces are often obscured by veiling and cloaking. These semi-visageless figures are intensely dramatic, often being preternaturally extended by the extremely long trains of the outfits, while they contort their poetic, nightmarish hands. Some of the images are deceptively simple and take their effect from striking composition. Some appear to be captured in a kind of void, an atmosphere vaguely but theatrically colored, while others are set amidst the brutal and ornate beauty of natural landscapes defined by sea, rock, or cave. The craggy textures of these settings add depth to the images highlighting the severe black of the clothing. Witchy and eerie, Kotko’s photography is stylishly ominous, occupying a perfect space between surreal and elegant.

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The Domestic Uncanny: Photography by Marianna Rothen

Marianna Rothen’s ultra dreamy, nostalgic photographs explore themes of womanhood, beauty, power, and domestic spheres. Many of them look as if they could have come straight out of the 1970s. With their gorgeous styling, the voluminous retro hairdos of cigarette-wielding housewives, the strange and slightly unnerving spaces that these glamorous beings seem to inhabit, Rothen’s images have a spontaneous feeling of the momentary, candid life caught on the move, yet at the same time a carefully composed, poised look. They are saturated in color and have a lush vagueness – the dreamy fading of the light around windows and skies suggests someone’s loveliest and most undying memories.

Many of Rothen’s photos make use of mannequins, emphasizing the uncanniness of the scenes she is capturing. The results are a mysterious and spectacularly beautiful depiction of the intimacy and eerie violence of a life seemingly lived in domestic obscurity – the drama of a psychological existence made up of husbands, babies, neighbors, girlfriends, isolation, eroticism, rebellion, and psychic death. The playful banditry in several of the tableaux, with the women holding knives and guns, seems to subvert the violent games of little boys – and the fact that only mannequins represent men is a reversal of the perceived doll-like nature of little girls who grow up to be wives and mothers.

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Oracles and Phantasms of Caitlin McCarthy

Caitlin McCarthy is one of the artists whose prints I have the most of in my home. They are eminently frameable, hangable, and delightful. I love her goddess series, which renders feminine deities and figures of folklore from across the world in concise and whimsical portraits. Her drawings also feature characters from horror films, Gothic authors, and Spiritualists. As McCarthy states on her Website, she is fascinated by “Victorian sensibilities and the occult,” and her work portrays “visions of dark dreamy women in the form of seers, mystics, goddesses, and witches.”

McCarthy’s graphite illustrations have an eerie and ethereal feel, sometimes dark, sometimes darling. I like the radiance that comes across in some of her monochromatic works, the sense of an otherworldly glow, and a certain wispy quality, being able to see the strokes of the pencil. The ribbons of ectoplasm that curl out, seance-style, from some of the entranced figures, are also appealing to me. These women’s eyes often appear blind but perhaps gifted with an inner sight. Amidst lit candles floating in midair, in their pointed hats, veils, and headdresses, they dream on in their melancholy bliss.

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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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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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Luminous Procuress: The Photography of Steven Arnold

Steven Arnold’s playful and electrifying tableaux vivants incorporated elements from silent film, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Surrealism, and mysticism. His assemblages are whimsical, sharply contrasting, and delightful for a lover of film history. They are musingly clever and dreamy, evident of a masterful and fantastic touch. These stark black-and-white images exude a quality of theatricality and wild expressiveness, a sense of mischievous quixoticism, which is so striking as well as charming. I wish there were more contemporary artists like the late Steven Arnold. His wonderful photographs put me in mind of a still version of the work of filmmaker Guy Maddin.

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The Surrealist Bestiary of Marzena Ablewska-Lech

Marzena Ablewska-Lech, self-described as a Jungian reader and “collector of wounds,” is a London-based Polish artist. Intensely inspired by her dreams, her work often contains fantastical creatures, archetypes, ladies and beasts reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance art. Her works are like illuminated manuscripts with their small motifs, gold foil, and rich colors. The backgrounds sometimes give a sense of infinite convolution and entanglement; at the same time her depictions have a naive expressionism, and the curlicued, quaint forms which hearken back to illumination. Her style reminds me of a cross between old-school surrealists such as Remedio Varos or Leonara Carrington and medieval religious art – a strange and wonderful combination.

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