Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Sergio Barrale’s Giant Drawings Engross at Every Angle

On the section marked “Giant Drawing” on Sergio Barrale’s website, a factoid provides a sense of the hardship that goes into each portrait: “500-700 pencils died in the process of making these works.” Look into any corner of Sergio’s “faces,” and you’ll believe him.

On the section marked “Giant Drawing” on Sergio Barrale’s website, a factoid provides a sense of the hardship that goes into each portrait: “500-700 pencils died in the process of making these works.” Look into any corner of Sergio’s “faces,” and you’ll believe him.

These graphite renderings, some larger than the artist himself, have an immersive quality that fulfills with every angle. Whether you step back and take in their weathered expressions or stare inches away into a far corner, there are thousands of lines that absorb you. It’s the kind of texturing that makes you want to touch it, yet you feel you might want to ask permission from its vulnerable subjects first.

Yet, Barrale’s work extends past this meditation on aged and multi-textured visages. He also has a knack for what exists underneath the skin and flesh, revealing haunting skulls consume and overlap one another.

A timelapse video on Barrale’s YouTube account does answer that lingering question: Wouldn’t this process get messy? Surely, that’s why he wears the gloves. The minute-and-a-half video gives us a look inside his process, slowly crafting a hyper-detailed, painstaking creation before our eyes. And in the end, we see the word “Blamo!” pops up on the screen. Because what else can be said?

See more of the artist’s process and finished works on his Instagram. As shown below, recent works have garnered pops of color.


Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
A Medium is an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthly world and a world of spirits. In art, medium refers to a mode of artistic expression or communication. For Australian artist Lucy Hardie, whose elaborate drawings explore spirituality and duality of nature, they are one and the same. Hardie is the great granddaughter of a Medium. A story that has been passed down is that her grandmother once walked into a séance and saw a person levitating. Inspired by her own history and personal experience, Hardie then combines symbols of life after death and awakening to capture that which connects us.
With a new piece dated every few days between November 2014 and January 2015, Mike Giant's latest series of drawings serves as a map of the current state of the artist's life. Though Giant is originally from New Mexico, his name is synonymous with the San Francisco graffiti and tattoo scenes, where he developed himself as an artist in the 1990s and 2000s. With rapid gentrification squeezing out many of San Francisco's creative enclaves, Giant relocated to Boulder, Colorado two years ago. His upcoming solo show, "Colorado," opens at FFDG in San Francisco on February 13, meditates on various transitions in Giant's life — his move halfway across the country, the end of a relationship, and various shifts in his lifestyle choices.
The acrylic paintings and drawings of Cristòfol Pons are visions of converging realities: past and future, art history and something otherworldly. His characters and visual motifs, though consistent throughout his work, point in varying directions. As he’s said, “The present is just a moment that vanishes at every step, the past is a blurry haze and future a horizon longing to fade.” He will at times point to the recognizable, perhaps a piece by Jeff Koons or a historical icon, yet only as a point of entry into something else entirely.
In a new collection of paintings and drawings, Kevin Cyr pays tribute to the working class via worn vehicles spotted and documented around New York City. “Labor Day” at Jonathan Levine Projects in New Jersey progresses the artist’s love affair with the concept of what vehicles say about the people who drive them. Cyr first appeared in the pages of this magazine in Hi-Fructose Vol. 10, and he’s part of the “Turn the Page: The First 10 Years of Hi-Fructose” exhibit, currently at Crocker Art Museum.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List