Nicholas Lockyer - Collage

(Nicholas Lockyer)

The Spirit of the Beehive aka El Espíritu de la Colmena (1973)

Haunting and beautiful, an oneiric portrait of the desolate and broken landscape of youth in post civil-war Spain, the Spirit of the Beehive is widely considered to be a masterpiece of Spanish cinema. On the surface the film is about the trauma of the visual; a young girl in a rural village attends a traveling film screening where she views Jame's Whale's Frankenstein and soon after begins to roam the countryside looking for the monster. Director Victor Erice masterfully crafts this incredibly lyrical film as a tribute to the seeping darkness that otherwise is known as coming to consciousness.

Denis Forkas Kostromitin

(Denis Forkas Kostromitin)

Justin Bartlett - Drawings

(Justin Bartlett)

Gromyko Semper - 'Woodcuts'

Gromyko Semper is an artist based in Cabantuan City, Philippines. Largely self taught, his work has been exhibited in Germany, the United States, Portugal and the United Kingdom., Semper’s drawings are executed to imitate woodcut prints, embody a personal, invented mythology after the fashion of William Blake in the early nineteenth century; the symbolists, surrealists and decadents; and up to and including British artist Patrick Woodroffe’s Mythopoeikon (1976) and The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony (1979) and the forerunner of Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, the influential visionary painter, Ernst Fuchs. Semper’s woodblock style has some affinities with Albretch Durer’s, but is quite unique, drawing heavily on both the Roman Catholic and supernatural folk traditions of the Philippines, quantum mechanics, alchemy, world mythology, classical art, occult, art nouveau, and the gamut of erotic drawing from Japanese Ukiyo-E to Aubrey Beardsley. Gromyko sees his artwork as a mystic revelation of a hitherto unknown mythos and pantheon, a synthesis of Jung, Kabala, Gnosticism, and various archetypes borrowed from the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, the Middle and Far East to encode a synthesis of his views.

(Gromyko Semper)

Alessandro Bavari - Metachaos

Metachaos, from Greek Meta (beyond) and Chaos (the abyss where the eternally-formless state of the universe hides), indicates a primordial shape of ameba, which lacks in precise morphology, and it is characterized by mutation and mitosis. In fact the bodies represented in METACHAOS, even though they are characterized by an apparently anthropomorphous appearance, in reality they are without identity and conscience. They exist confined in a spaceless and timeless state, an hostile and decadent hyperuranium where a fortress, in perpetual movement, dominates the landscape in defense of a supercelestial, harmonic but fragile parallel dimension. In its destructive instinct of violating the dimensional limbo, the mutant horde penetrates the intimacy of the fortress, laying siege like a virus. Similar to the balance of a philological continuum in human species, bringing the status of things back to the primordial broth. METACHAOS is a multidisciplinary audio-visual project, articulated in a short film, a set of photography and mix-technique paintings. The purpose of the project is to represent the most tragic aspects of the human nature and of its motion, such as war, madness, social change and hate. - Alessandro Bavari

                                                 

(Metachaos)

Guy Laramee - Altered Books

"The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole - is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?, When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination., My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “what” we think, but “that” we think., So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are., After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.” - Guy Laramee 

(Guy Laramee)