Tomorrow night, Chet Zar’s “The Demon Show” and Jasmine Worth’s “Dark Night of the Soul” side by side solo shows are opening at Last Rites Gallery in NYC. Both shows will be on view May 23rd through July 3rd, 2015. In “Dark Night of the Soul”, Worth explores the act of transformation through suffering. Inspired by both the occult and female experience, the artist utilizes meticulous layering techniques to craft scenes from fairytales gone awry, swirling seamlessly between the sweet and the morbid. With “The Demon Show,” Zar’s subject matter is surreal and darkly humorous yet genuine in its existence, often revealing humankind at its barest form. As the artist states, “We all share feelings of fear and loneliness. We feel insecure and vulnerable. We feel separate from our environment and each other. These are the feelings that I try to convey in my paintings. These are the feelings that connect us.” Visually, the artist’s work expresses a unifying thread that we are all the same within and contains a bold message: we are the monsters.
Jasmine Worth:
Chet Zar:
One could say that Surrealism as a movement is a way for artists to seek distraction from the mundane and engage in fantasy. On his current exhibition at
Iranian painter Ali Esmaeillou reveals haunting parallel universes beneath the pleasant facades of everyday life. In each series of paintings, Esmaeillou explores the psyche of specific archetypes, such as warriors, or digs into the personalities of the characters that compose a particular story, like the great 10th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh.