a quick note on...

contemporary art and its artists - the familiar and unfamiliar, but none too familiar ----- quick notes by Lizzy Hajos

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vivid tangibility: a quick note on Henry Hudson

Plasticine is transformed into unrecognisable form in Hudson's hands -- moulded into intricate, vividly figurative scenes that are laden with a sense of social consciousness... 

http://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/10-artworks-by-henry-hudson-you-should-know/

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casual exuberance: a quick note on Laurencja Zurek

Approaching photography with a sort of casual exuberance, in her best work Zurek’s insistent exploration of the human enjoyment of nature becomes captured in simple but texturally suggestive images, in which vibrancy is mixed with a sense of harmony...

http://www.7sobm.co.uk/work/laurencja-zurek/

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shadowy dream-worlds: a quick note on Rachel Suggs

Rachel Suggs’ shadowy worlds are charged with an uneasy sense of the unknown…

http://www.7sobm.co.uk/work/rachel-suggs/

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filmic haze: a quick note on Toby Harvard

Documenting his experiences in a way which is both personal and elusive, the images of Toby Harvard  are characterised by a filmic haze...

http://www.7sobm.co.uk/work/toby-harvard/

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digital daydreams: a quick note on Filip Hodas

Graphic Designer Filip Hodas carries out daily experiments in the tools of his craft, designed to challenge and develop his skill. These playful, vibrant and flawlessly executed digital landscapes are the result. Geological, mechanical and other naturalistic elements are integrated into immense landscapes that appear to be primal and futuristic in equal measure. 

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shifting beauty: a quick note on Sayaka Maruyama

Ever since her collaborative efforts with hair-stylist and conceptual artist Tomihoro Kono, Sayaka Maruyama has been creating gorgeous images in which sumptuous projections of beauty are subtly disturbed by darker intimations. In the Japan Avant Garde series (created with Kono under the alias Neon o’clocks), new and old aesthetic elements become mixed as bold colours and compositions, collagic effects, and the glamour of fashion-photography meld with hair-styles, make-up and theatrical and traditional costumes that recall the geisha tradition. The luxurious, painterly aesthetic in which these young women are stylized recalls this most fundamentally. These portraits almost seem like posters -- advertisements of beauty, artistry, stifled suffering. 

In many of the images, the women cast an absent or directly thoughtful and sorrowful glance. Their sadness has a double significance. It is surely sincere on one level -- an indication of the sadness and suffering at the heart of the geisha lifestyle and, arguably an essential part of the pursuit of beauty across cultures and historical eras. But the sadness is also doubled as a staged sadness - a performance. In these images, the women are playing a part. And the geisha’s beauty was not static -- it was supposed to be fluidly realized through musical performances and all aspects of contemporary cultural existence. When they recounted tales of suffering through dance or music, the sadness had to be felt in the performance. Though manufactured, their painted beauty was required to shape-shift, without losing its elegance. 

Similarly, in her Sakura series, delicate cherry-blossoms adorn and beautify portraits of Japanese women whilst also assuming an ominous presence. In one image, two cherry-blossoms are stuffed into a woman’s mouth; in another, a branch of cherry-blossoms is clasped around a woman’s neck. Sakura means cherry-blossom in Japanese: have these women become fashioned into inanimate flora - do they hold the same place in the culture of beauty as cherry-blossoms, always heavily appropriated in art, acting as stylized Japanese symbols of beauty and its transience? Or are the women merely acting as silent, formal accessories to the cherry-blossoms? It is as if they are being delicately suffocated by the culture of beauty. All this softness and prettiness comes at a cost. Most interestingly, the polished and particular beauty of Maruyama’s work is undeniable: what does this say about our culture now?  

Both Maruyama’s solo and collaborative work not only throws light on Japanese perceptions of beauty (and in turn Western perceptions of Japanese beauty), but asks us to consider our contemporary relationship with beauty, and how historical attitudes to beauty still resonate in the modern day. 

http://www.sayakamaruyama.com/

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masterful minimalism: a quick note on Noell Oszvald

In the monochrome landscapes of Noell Oszvald - the 25 year-old Hungarian artist - the content is sparse, but, also on account of this very reason, pregnant with ambiguous symbolism.

Oszvald's precise apprehension of the interrelation and aesthetic potential of elemental forms is evidently manifested in her minimalist compositions, which are immediately striking on an stylistic level but are also suffused with obliqueness and mystery; with pronounced but often dark and indeterminate emotional resonances that are only heightened by the illusion of simplicity she achieves through building up her composite works ‘from several different pieces’.

For more of my thoughts on Oszvald’s work, see http://www.7sobm.co.uk/work/noell-oszvald/ 

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Gilded imperfection: a quick note on Yeesookyung

Constructed from fragments abandoned by master ceramicists and gilded with gold leaf, Yeesookyung’s life-sized creations are innervated by their idiosyncrasies.

They can be appreciated abstractly -- intriguing clusters of ceramic bubbles, peculiar forms, beautiful sculptural masses -- but also seem to have a shimmering figurative quality: from this angle, this work is a lantern-laden, melancholic man; a fragment of a story; a ghost; a memory; an illusion. The significance of the multi-surfaced form shifts and develops the more it is contemplated. In all of her work, the cascading forms of her re-assembled ceramic fragments are equally impressive in their weightiness and their nebulousness.

Through Yeesookyung’s creative imagination, the dead materials are breathed into life, and the fragments of historic practices are brought into modernity.

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marked by art: a quick note on Alexander Tinei

Most of Tinei’s paintings - almost always figurative portraits or collage-esque arrangements of body parts  - have an eeriness about them, as his strange and often unclothed figures sometimes lie or fall across the canvas as if lifeless, or, conversely, sometimes tumble over each other in ritualistic night-time games. Either way, the figures either turn away from us, or are poised to look at us but offer no more than a gaze that is as absent as it is expressive, and haunting on both counts. Some of his paintings have a textural bareness about them too: the paint is thin and the forms sketchy. Most distinctively, their skin is always unnaturally marked by lines of blue (and its variations), or sometimes streaks of red and blue tracing their forms like externalised veins.

Supposedly, these blue lines are ‘marks of alienation’. But do the alienated want to be identified; does their artistic portrayal alienate them further from themselves? Or is it enough that the marks bring them together through association, so the alienated can at least be alienated together? The blue lines seem to identify them as exclusive to Tinei’s artistic world -- marked by him, and so potentially marked by the violative implications of artistic examination, or else accepted into and thus soothed by their entrance into the artistic realm. Interestingly, whether his subjects are, or are not, alienated in their own spheres, their presentation on the whole alienates us further from them. But, then again, we are also brought closer to them through the awareness of their alienated identities. We are of course aware that, ultimately, they were marked for us. 

The delicate tension between the artist’s own alienation to and intimacy with his own art and its subjects (and therefore also himself) is certainly felt in the paintings above. They’re two of Tinei’s most sophisticated works. Here we get a rare glimpse of his feeling for softness and sadness and vulnerability. The girl especially is closed within herself. The figures look away -- thoughtful -- and their thoughtfulness suggests depth of feeling and character. Here the alienated are not lacking in dignity. 

(http://tinei.tumblr.com/

 http://www.emptykingdom.com/featured/alexander-tinei/) 

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‘organic-psychedelia’: a quick note on Amanda Krantz

It is Amanda Krantz herself who describes her work as ‘organic-psychedelia’. Certainly, organic forms seem to burst open and flow through each other with riotous energy, and her colour combinations feel undeniably psychedelic. In some images, flowers and fauna are instantly recognisable. In others, organic matter is distilled into and dispensed in its imaginary essences and although, as in the image above, there is no definite indication of form, it seems to denote a new world that is recognisably organic --  perhaps even under, or on the edge of, the sea. It is a world where the constitutional essences are fluid, like the paint Krantz allows to run spontaneously on the page. 

http://www.amandakrantz.com/

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the sacred and mundane: a quick note on Alexey Kondakov

In Alexey Kondakov’s wonderfully photoshopped images, in which figures from classical art are found to grace grubby city scenes, explicitly anachronistic and contrasting elements are fused with surprising success. 

The figures, and especially the sacred ones, do appear to have an apparitional glow about them (undoubtedly accentuated by the contrasts in aesthetic), but they also seem remarkably real in these settings -- their representational merit is redoubled in these ‘real’ contexts, and so too is their emblematic appeal, which, to greater or lesser extents, is re-configured over time, or through its enforced displacement: in the second image, for example, the figures who enact the beheading of St John in Caravaggio’s original, shed their specific significance in this ‘modern’ setting. Here, the victim is as nameless as the perpetrators. Nevertheless, despite their anonymity, the cold criminality of their gesture echoes across the ages. 

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dramatic radiance: a quick note on Alexander James

London-based artist Alexander James is acclaimed for producing photographic images with a painterly resonance. By submerging sculptural compositions in dark tanks of water, preparing his subjects using self-crafted techniques and never editing his works traditionally or digitally in postproduction, James not only seeks to ‘cross out the lines’ governing artistic categorisation but inspires a sense of primal significance and mystery in his work.

Their colours – brilliant against black – aching with the dramatic radiance of Caravaggio, James’ figures arise from a well of negative potential, as if from the depths of the fugitive self.

http://distilennui.com/#!homepage

for more of my thoughts on James’ work see: http://distilennui.com/blog/tag/the-artistry-of-alexander-james/ 

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effortless artistry: a quick note on Bi Trố

Bi Trố’s grasp of beauty appears to be completely effortless. His photos are simple — mainly consisting of figures who seem to be his friends or family finished in monochrome or softened colours– but some of his compositions nevertheless seem completely perfect, and the personal connection of the subjects to the artist seems to radiate from their expressions.

Gorgeous artistry is coupled with a feeling of intimate emotional experience, which we share in, or at the very least, are allowed to momentarily trespass upon.

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frenzied fantasies: a quick note on Stefan Zsaitsits

The shifting illusions of childhood fantasy are crystallized in the drawings of Stefan Zsaitsits, where images overlap to create uncomfortable cross-overs between adult content and childish figures, innocence and its eroticisation, brutality and play, the animate and inanimate, and a haunting impression of the fluidity of identity jarring against the concreteness of its grotesque realisations.

http://www.zsaitsits.com/en/

for a longer commentary on Zsaitsits see my blog: https://ehajos.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/stefan-zsaitsits/ 

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suprematist slickness: a quick note on Bianca Chang

Nearly all of Bianca Chang’s works are completely white, paper compositions, but the material is wonderfully manipulated to form crisp, geometric, sculptural canvases that obviously draw on Suprematist motifs but embellish them with a contemporary slickness and a detailed attention to textural contrasts. As a result, the white canvases are coloured by the play of light and shadow and are given literal and figurative depth through their indentation.

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the enigma of identity: a quick note on Flora Borsi

Flora Borsi is a young Hungarian artist who’s already got quite a lot of attention for her photo-manipulated images. Nowadays it seems like everyone’s using photo-manipulation techniques to create whimsical and mostly insignificant pictures, but Flora’s elegant understanding of the artform, and fundamental interest in problems of identity, is shown in the way in which she is able to portray her sense of humour as successfully as her interest in serious and thought-provoking subject-matter. Her images are metaphorical enigmas waiting to be unravelled….

http://www.floraborsi.com/191724/gallery

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cosmic-like energy: a quick note on William Kendall

There’s something really refreshing about the cosmic-like energy and colour combinations of Kendall’s paintings. Lines, fragments and liquid-like masses merge as if crashing on and gliding across the canvas, as if still charged by the moment of their creation, or at least preserving a sense of creative excitement which makes them equally satisfying on a superficial, aesthetic level and on the level of personal interpretation -- the emotive and expressive implications of the colours and forms. 

http://www.saatchiart.com/wkendall