Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Alvaro Tapia’s Intense Portraits Channel a Range of Emotions

Chilean artist Alvaro Tapia finds something sinister even in his most innocent subjects. His portrait illustrations feature friends, famous people, artists and others he admires. What lurks beneath the surface in these subjects — something grotesque and often evil — is what most attracts the artist. The end result, however, is far from ugly. Bursting with color and life, his portraits are high-impact. Tapia arranges contrasting colors, vector lines and geometric shapes so that they vibrate off one another. His subjects not only seem alive but ready to jump off the page right at the viewer’s throat.

Chilean artist Alvaro Tapia finds something sinister even in his most innocent subjects. His portrait illustrations feature friends, famous people, artists and others he admires. What lurks beneath the surface in these subjects — something grotesque and often evil — is what most attracts the artist. The end result, however, is far from ugly. Bursting with color and life, his portraits are high-impact. Tapia arranges contrasting colors, vector lines and geometric shapes so that they vibrate off one another. His subjects not only seem alive but ready to jump off the page right at the viewer’s throat.

At the moment of impact when our eyes first see the image, we are overwhelmed, maybe terrified, but definitely intrigued. This moment, though chaotic, was established by a slow and deliberate process of creation. Tapia first takes his subject and simplifies the image into vectors and large shapes. He then builds upon these shapes and lines as though he were creating a collage, using both analog and digital techniques. He then often adds a touch of watercolor to establish his hand’s own influence in the portrait.


Osvaldo Casanova

In Tapia’s portrait of Osvaldo Casanova, colors bleed down Casanova’s face and splatter onto the canvas behind his head. Casanova makes direct eye contact with us and his teeth are barred. He’s ready for a fight. Tapia frequently places the anger and emotion into the mouth and jaw, emphasizing craggy teeth or twisted lips, like in Angelica’s mouth below.


Angelica

Gruesome but sexy, the portraits are a fantasy rendition of the subject. Each person radiates power and a thirst for action. Although Tapia is looking for the devilish and ugly side of his subjects, the portraits depict an idealized form of the person — a superhero (or more likely supervillain) alter ego.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
San Francisco based artist John Wentz plays with texture and abstraction in what he calls his "fractured" oil paintings of figures. Previously featured on our blog, the figures in Went'z work have been described as hazy, dreamy, and stripped away, broken down to a combination of nondescript washes and bold areas of pigment that evoke the feeling of remembering a distant memory that comes back to us as distorted. In his artist statement, he explains that "working within the classical idiom of the human figure, his goal is to reduce and simplify the image to it’s core fundamentals: composition, color, and paint application."
Vladimir Kraynyk's work takes inspiration from art history and cutting-edge technology alike. His oil paintings of voluminous abstract forms reference the decorative arts of the Baroque period as well as contemporary 3D-rendered images. These disparate aesthetics combine to form geometric shapes that appear to be in constant motion. Forms come together and break apart like a colorful Big Bang repeating over and over again. Kraynyk has a background in graffiti, which comes through in the way his abstract shapes evoke calligraphy. Take a look at his work below.
Matthew Grabelsky's oil paintings are at the center of a show currently running at Dorothy Circus Gallery in London. The artist is known for infusing everyday subway scenes with his realistically rendered animal-human hybrids, with “Passengers” collecting five new works and four studies. The show runs through Jan. 5 at the space.
J. S. Weis, a Portland-based artist and designer, depicts scenes and creatures from nature in his drawings and paintings. And he includes the factor often removed from studies of the natural world: all of the unnatural stuff humans add to it. In two series, "unNaturalist" and "Specimens," it's not uncommon to see gorgeous reptiles writhing among cigarette butts or birds among sandwich bags. Weis was last featured on HiFructose.com here, ahead of his “Liquid Hymn” show at 1AM Gallery in 2014.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List