When astronauts went to the moon in 1968 with the dream of discovering new worlds, something unexpected happened. They looked back, and for the first time, gazed upon the Earth. These otherworldly paintings by Slovakian painter Patricia Koysova capture the same sense of wonder in simplicity and scale. Her colorful images inspired by science blow natural environments out of context and proportion to admire their raw beauty. It’s as if Koysova has taken our most recognizable landmarks and placed them under a microscope. Her massive works zoom into icebergs until they become dramatic shades of bright blues, while the evolution of a star starts to look like entrails. Through their abstraction, we’re able to focus on the commonality of these seemingly different things. Every breath we take has, at one time or another, been associated with another living organism. “Every one of us is carrying something unknown and because of this, there will always be the time and space for both silence (stagnation) and scream (desire) for something new,” Koysova shares. It is a metaphysical concept felt by other artists we’ve featured recently, such as in Mars-1’s replay of the Big Bang (here) and Ana Bagayan’s (here) illustrations of alien visitors. By comparison, there is some irony in Koysova’s work. While it seems to explore unknown realms beyond our own, at its core is an observation of the fundamentals of life.
Drawing with charcoal,
Tomorrow, California based graffiti artist