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Category: Visual Art

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Portrait of a Criminal

These “photographs of commitment” from the archive of the Sydney Justice and Police Museum are peculiarly expressive and charming. The vintage mug shots are full of the individuality and personalities of a various array of people who passed through Australia’s criminal justice system back in the early part of the 20th century – creating unintentional art – offering up to these fringe subjects a sliver of timelessness.

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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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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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