San Francisco based artist Eric Joyner will be presenting his newest body of work at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles this weekend. The show called “Sweet Dominion” marks Joyner’s fourth exhibition at the gallery and shows new subjects such as rain, transformers, cakes, anti-gravity, cats and migration. Born and raised in California, that was where Joyner discovered himself as an artist and where he was encouraged to explore his creativity, using themes that invite his viewers to visit the interplay between reality and imagination with a touch of humor.
Joyner’s work, previously featured on our blog, is characterized by his playful and surrealistic style that creates the harmony between the mix of cartoon characters, especially Japanese tin robots and colorful donuts (directly inspired by the film Pleasantville) inserted in all kinds of landscapes from the Dinosaur Ages to the bottom of the ocean. Eric Joyner depicts the tenuous conflict between children’s toys and the adulthood as a portrait of another reality. He brings to life the feeling of glee and naivety inserted in the skepticism of a grown up reality. He explains that there is no rational explanation to the new show, only things he likes and finds interesting, which allows the spectator to imagine stories, create interpretations, and even dream a little inside Eric’s surrealistic world.
In a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the 
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.
Los Angeles painter