Franc often paints ugly cats, in a realistic depiction, with 10% surreal elements thrown in the mix. He is inspired by the feel of 1970s sci-fi illustrations. He feels that the paintings are a necessity for him – visual motives, ideas, and messages pop up manifold throughout the day, and he needs to paint them to cleanse his mind. He tends to explore the ruthlessness of biology whilst avoiding any romanticizing of nature. Although he is a foreigner living in China, Asian or Chinese design elements are rarely found in his work – the subjects express just that “fish out of water” allegory. His daily feeling and experience of living in a different, alien culture and context reflects in both fascination and fear, opportunity and shortcomings, and brood behind the surface of his paintings. Franc’s first international exhibitions were at the Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, at group shows in 2020 and 2021. Currently he is preparing for a mini-solo show with the same gallery, opening in August 2021.

All paintings are acrylics on cardboard, 2020 and 2021

Franc Kaiser

Sofia Crespo is an artist with a huge focus in bio arts and technologies. One of her main interests is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.

instagram.com/soficrespo91
twitter.com/soficrespo91

Artist Statement

Matsumoto’s artwork reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving ecological milieus that are attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by socioeconomic and built environments. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures and ecosystems in the transient nature of shifting topography and geology.
The artwork explores the hybrid technique combining both traditional media (ink, acrylic, graphite, and photo collage) and digital media, manifesting the collective recognition of a multiplicity of epistemological viewpoints in all cognitive dimensions of spatiality.
The varying scale, juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections and visual metamorphoses are employed as the multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, the eco-political reality of the Anthropocene epoch, the advancement of biomaterial technologies and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration. Furthermore, the application of these techniques allow the work to transcend the boundaries between analog and digital media as well as between two- and multi-dimensional domains.
His compositional techniques imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our socio-cultural environments beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities, and that they conjure up the synthetic possibilities within which the spatial and temporal variations of existing spatial semiotics emerge as the potential products of alchemical procedures.

Biography

Ryota Matsumoto is a principal and founder of an award-winning interdisciplinary design office, Ryota Matsumoto Studio. He is an artist, designer and urban planner. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art in early 90’s. Matsumoto has previously collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Cesar Pelli, MIT Media Lab and Nihon Sekkei Inc. before establishing his office.
He presented his work for the 5th symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future at Cornell University in 2017 and currently serves as an adjunct lecturer of Transart institute, University of Plymouth.
His current interest gravitates around the embodiment of cultural possibilities in art, ecology, and urban topography.

http://www.ryotamatsumoto.com
https://www.facebook.com/ryota.matsumoto.718

Chris Boyko paints bizarre, strange, and unusual works. Each painting represents a hidden reality from the artist’s subconscious. These representations skirt the boundaries of surrealism and abstraction. Form and shape emerge from the paint. Nearly recognizable and figurative, yet remaining alien, beyond reach, ambiguous. Shapes or sculptures resemble figures or images found in wisps of smoke or clouds in the sky.

In Boyko’s worlds, weird alien figures (like goop) reach out and clasp each other. Are these are psychic, metaphorical structures? Crystalized memories? Microscopic organisms? Or alien landscapes? The viewer’s mind stumbles for answers… but finds weird ambiguity, and their own subconscious revelations reflected back at them.

Artist Statement

The subconscious is constructed like a giant web, which as a whole creates an individual. If one were to examine each individual piece, they would realize it’s composed of multiple ideas, memories, and feelings which are constantly shifting. It’s this shift within our subconscious that changes our perception of reality. It’s why each of us can respond differently to a multitude of situations.

Using automatic painting techniques, my mind enters a meditative state. As I begin to follow the strings of the subconscious web, the organic forms develop within the painting. One form leads to another, like a trail of thoughts. It’s as if my mind and the paint are in sync with each other. As I explore my own mind, gaining an understanding of myself; I’m also gaining an understanding of the forms.

boykoart.com
instagram.com/boykoart

Nicola Samori examines the theme of obsession from a number of different perspectives: that of the human body, religion, science, and the obsession of the artist with his own work. In his new paintings and sculptures he references art historical and biblical representations of ‘the healing of the possessed’.  Examples of such associations are Raphael’s “Transfiguration”, Jean-Martin Charcot, who “invented” the medical diagnosis of hysteria in his hospital in Paris in the late 19th Century, and Efisio Marini, an Italian scientist and physician who created rather unconventional sculptures from preserved corpses.

Via nicolasamori.com

Nicola Samori paints renaissance-style paintings with a contemporary twist: portions of the images are disfigured. Through melting, scratching, or other forms of destruction Samori degenerates what could otherwise be conceivably a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. I love this contemporary twist on representational art. Rather than the work being simply the world inside the paint– the surface paint itself becomes part of the story as it displays the ruin of the image– melting off the canvas or being smeared. The artist displays the highest technical skill in his oil paintings in the portions of the work that he doesn’t deface.

Excerpted from Juxtapoz:

The paintings of Italian artist, Nicola Samori, are full of sensuous energy. The thirty-five year old’s style is derived from the classical paintings of early renaissance masters. With the highest degree of precession, his figures emerge from the darkness of pictorial space into the light with dramatic realism.

Samori’s methodology is one that intertwines both violence and romance, which make his paintings all the more painful: He distorts them, smears them with his hand, disfigures hem with the palette knife, paints them over, or like a torturer removes the half-dry skin of the uppermost layer of paint with a scalpel. Yet, through this destructive deconstruction, his compositions have an eery sense of beauty and elegance.

Mario Martinez (MARS-1) paints painstakingly detailed psychedelic/visionary artwork inspired by biology, mysticism, and architecture. The work is abstract and non-figurative, and tends to have a somewhat limited color palette. I’m not sure whether the artist would appreciate a comparison with Alex Grey. Although they are in the same solar system, the two artists are also as different as the are similar.

Statement

Mario Martinez (aka MARS-1) paints from a penetrating perspective of great depth. Viewers are drawn into his imaginative compositions, overflowing with colorful geometric and organic shapes, layered to form unique patterns and textures.

The artist signature style of vast, abstracted, quasi-extraterrestrial looking landscapes feature imagery of surreal distortions, contained within spherically convex transparent bubbles. Skillfully combining optical color blending with perspective line work, his painting techniques result in very three-dimensional forms, which echo the anatomy of architecture, and microcosmic structures of biology.

These 3-D qualities transcend into his sculptural work, as well. Mars-1’s distinctly individual aesthetic is not easily compared to the vision of his contemporaries or artists from past movements. His constantly evolving process continues to expand with each new series of work, seemingly beyond the reaches of even his own awareness.

Themes explored range from very scientific to more esoteric phenomena. From theoretical physics, metamorphosis and collective consciousness, to ufology and examining possibilities of otherworldly principles, the relative link between physical and life sciences are applied throughout. Transitional energies, natural multiplicity, helixes and spontaneous biological occurrences all come together, forming imagery with hypotheses beyond the scope of modern technology.

Via http://mars-1.com/

Micah Ofstedahl paints what appear to be abstract surrealism. But the paintings are inspired by discoveries of science such as single-cell organisms, the structure of a bee’s eye, or anatomy at the cellular level. These are subjects that biology and microbiology continue to explore, from the neurons in our brains to the fabric of the universe. In this sense, Ofstedahl’s paintings are semi-representational, and in creating his abstract art he is drawing on the rich diversity of forms found in nature.

micahofstedahl.com

Jaroslaw’s surrealistic work includes three main themes.

1. Surrealistic, epic dreamscapes.
2. Strange skin-monsters.
3. Erotic fantasy art. (Not  included in this post.)

Much of his work is preoccupied with the concept of time; clocks are the subject of a fourth sculptural series.

http://kukowski.pl/

Meats Meier is currently a freelance illustrator and animator living in Downtown Los Angeles, California. He taught the first ever ZBrush course at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, and is the author of the very popular “Introduction to ZBrush” training DVD produced by the Gnomon Workshop. Meats is also an award-winning digital artist (including two Expose’ Master awards) with over a decade of experience in a wide range of artistic fields. Meats feature film credits include “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” and “Hellboy” as a technical director and compositer. He has also worked as an airbrush artist, lead artist at a video game studio (Beyond Games), and has had a successful career as an independent artist and illustrator. Meier’s artwork is on the cover of numerous books, magazines, and web sites and he was honored with the prestigious “Maya Master” title by Alias at SIGGRAPH 2003. In 2006, Meats helped with the stereoscopic graphics for the cover of the TOOL album “10,000 Days” and now continues to work on animations along side Chet Zar and Camella Grace for their live touring concerts.

Via Graphic Mania

Meats Meier

Fantastic figurative digital artwork.

It has a really remarkable use of vector-type designs that interact with the content within the work but, rather than looking “graphic design-ish,” it really takes it to the next level.

http://parablevisions.com/blog/