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Category: Visual Art

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The Human Mystery: Art by Miles Johnston

The romantic, extremely detailed, luminous drawings of Miles Johnston remind me of classic Surrealism combined with a delicately beautiful modern aesthetic. Dealing with themes of doubling, recurrence, division, and distortion, the wavering, haunting, gentle gorgeousness of these graphite and paper works depicts inner states of being: crisis, sublimeness, desolation. What I particularly love about his drawings is the tenderness of the light, which is so palpable, yet so dreamy. Johnston manifests a wistful and almost idyllic feeling towards the subjects as in their melancholy radiance they undergo surreal transformations and expressions of interiority. The lyricism and tremendous realism of Johnston’s art resonate deeply with the viewer, invoking nostalgia as well as strangeness.

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Ozabu

Ozabu’s elegant, hyper-realistic pencil and graphite drawings fuse women with birds, mantises, and other fauna and flora. Inspired by Japanese mythology, this delicate linework illustrates a hybrid symbolic imagery with utter precision and ethereal melancholy. Thinkspace describes the figures depicted in her works, which exude a soft radiance, as “woeful apparitions or powerful augurs. Ozabu’s world is a mysteriously beautiful shadow land.” Her solo show Meguru is currently exhibiting at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco through November 23rd.

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Malina

Huzzah, I have acquired a copy of the beautiful sold-out Malina print from BloodMilk Exquisite Corpse! This illustration of expressive hands, flowers, snakes, and planchette, by the amazing Liza Corbett, combines my love of floral arrangements in art with my fascination for spiritualism.

Exquisite Corpse takes its name from the 1920s parlor game in which surrealists each added to an assemblage of words or images in turn, and is a collaborative collective focusing on limited runs of art objects by independent artists and craftspeople, including perfumes, incense, handmade trinket boxes and offering bowls, and other things of uncanny beauty.

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Larval Mysticism: The Art of Alessandro Sicioldr

The ethereal, uncanny paintings of Alessandro Sicioldr have an almost religious beauty. Mystical and intriguing, the melancholy languor of the somberly dressed figures that populate his strange, surreal, desolate dream-landscapes – those pallid, ascetic faces with their opaque and vaguely serene expressions, gentle enigmas all – sometimes partaking of the substance of nightmare with the disturbing contrast between black garb and death-white skin – evoke classical works, medieval spiritual richness and symbolism. Combining traditional techniques with modern aesthetics, these splendid paintings are technically realistic but have a haunting surreality and a high degree of dark imaginativeness.

There are translucent, cocoon-like souls in the skies, multitudes of faces looming titanically above the main subjects, milky luminous streams of souls or spirits, shrouded tiny figures of the seeming dead (or merely transfigured, in the sleep of metamorphosis), a plurality of eyes, faces above and below water… I think of those strange groups of diaphanous beings with opalescent flesh as larvae, an archaic term, larva meaning ghost-like or masked in Latin, which oddly fits due to their rather grub-like reminiscence. These are visionary and hallucinatory, their delicate foreboding, weaved of both gossamer and grave textures, itself a form of beauty. The sense of lostness of individuals in vast grim landscapes also reminds me of artists like Zdzisław Beksiński. Subtle but quite striking, Sicioldr’s work is of the type that is the most appealing to my imagination and so lingeringly lovely for me.

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The Lost Surrealism of Remedios Varo

The beautiful, rich, luminous, and everlastingly mysterious paintings of Remedios Varo, one of the major female surrealists of the first half of the 20th century, have an almost precious precision and an effect of miniaturism. Enigmatic, sometimes comical, with an incredible depth of color, her symbolic imagery reveals a hidden world which is hauntingly lovely, an internal labyrinth, landscapes that gently unsettle and lure with their indefinable melancholy and sense of strangeness. Inspired by mysticism and alchemy, she also evoked a sense of claustrophobia, of cloistered and hushed, shadowy existence, of entrapment.

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Saintesses by Sad Riot

These are lovely interpretations of four female saints by Sad Riot: Lucy whose emblem is eyes on a golden plate, her eyes having been taken out; Philomena the virgin martyr who underwent numerous torments, scourging, drowning, being shot by arrows (and was finally decapitated), rather than become the Emperor Diocletian’s wife; Maria Goretti the eleven-year-old child, stabbed fourteen times with an awl; and Cecilia, who lived for three days after being struck on the neck three times with a sword.