When Lise Stoufflet creates an artwork, she begins with an intention. Only the titles, such as “Tous” (All) or “Magi” (Magic) offer clues as to the French artist’s original motivations to convey a concept, mood or atmosphere. As Stoufflet explains in a French-language interview with Boum Bang Magazine, the artist is often surprised by the resulting images, such as that of “Tous,” in which blindfolded men in identical blue uniforms lay on the ground, bound by hand and foot with strings.
Stoufflet uses shadows in her paintings to depict ominous moments suspended in time. Physical links like ribbons and strings that extend outside the pictorial plane and three-dimensional objects that are displayed on the ground in front of paintings invite the viewer’s experience, knowledge and imagination to complete the narrative hinted at within Stoufflet’s paintings.
In the paintings of 
Berkeley painter 
South African artist Linsey Levendall has a hyper-detailed style that appears at once chaotic and controlled. His work moves between surreal scenes packed with figures and objects that nearly resemble Rube Goldberg machine in their connectivity and a looser, multi-hued style that focuses on a single subject.