Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

The Pixelated Art of Uno Moralez

Russian artist Uno Moralez crafts images that are a throwback to seemingly less sophisticated, earlier days of digital art. Yet, what the artist has done is forge a novel, fascinating way to communicate narrative. They’re not quite comics, yet Moralez often depends on more than one image to share his stories, which move between pulp, campy horror, sci-fi, or something stranger and dream-like.

Russian artist Uno Moralez crafts images that are a throwback to seemingly less sophisticated, earlier days of digital art. Yet, what the artist has done is forge a novel, fascinating way to communicate narrative. They’re not quite comics, yet Moralez often depends on more than one image to share his stories, which move between pulp, campy horror, sci-fi, or something stranger and dream-like.




In a 2012 interview with The Comics Journal, the mysterious artist (who actually uses Uno Moralez as a pseudonym) talked about the influence of David Lynch and Soviet art in his work. “I publish my work on the web because it looks like it was planned and created there—in its original form, in other words,” Moralez said. “Furthermore, it’s available for maximum number of people.”





The artist’s animated GIFs have their own lives, tales that play out in a section on the artist’s website labeled “loops.” He says he makes these because of how “concise and expressive” they are, though he takes a measured approach to when he uses the format.





A post on his Tumblr offers insight into his process, from sketch to product.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
For his latest series, French photographer and digital artist Cal Redback has created slightly unsettling portraits of people fused with nature. Many of his subjects are inspired by those of fantasy and horror, as in his version of "Treebeard" of The Lord of the Rings or "Hellraiser". Redback adds a plant-like appearance to his own characters by photographing them and then digitally manipulating the image in Photoshop. Botanicals sprout from their cheeks and eye sockets in beautiful and sometimes painful looking displays, even more alarming by their casual demeanor.
An expert in the software program Arnold, Lee Griggs manipulates photographs to take on sculptural forms that look convincingly 3D. His new series, "Deformations," takes a studio portrait of an anonymous man and warps it into geometric shapes. In each portrait, his skull stretches into a cube, an enormous sphere, or a cone. Rather grotesquely, Griggs captures the way the surface of the skin would stretch tautly over this unusual skeletal architecture, making the man's face contort into pained grimaces in the process. Check out some of Griggs' work below.
Canadian multimedia artist Jon Rafman often explores the boundaries between our real lives and our virtual lives. Working primarily in digital media, his works illustrate a modern sense of reality through humour and irony. He is perhaps best known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View, titled "9-Eyes". In his ongoing series "Brand New Paint Job", Rafman re-appropriates famous paintings by contemporary artists into the 3D digital realm.
Tishk Barzanji plays with architecture and perspective in pastel-hued landscapes. The mixed-media works use both digital and photographic techniques to create these absorbing, yet off-kilter explorations. The use of varied sources takes the viewer in and far out of reality within a single work.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List