Johan Barrios, a Colombian mixed-media artist, uses graphite, oils, watercolor, and other materials in his figurative works, all carrying surreal abstractions that evoke mystery and quiet drama. There’s a potent blend of tension and tactile intrigue in the artist’s work, with conversing textures and at times, absurd staging. The artist has a new show at Anya Tish Gallery in Houston Texas, titled “Adormecido.” The artist was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
The gallery had this to say about the artist’s work: “With surreal and cinematic qualities, the rich graphite drawings and oil paintings read as photographs from a distance, sharing the same metallic, oxidized atmosphere of tintypes. They are as suggestive as they are ambiguous, alluding to narratives that never fully form and presenting obscured figures in scenes without any definable sense of time and space, candidly capturing reality yet leaving it slightly ajar.”
This is the artist’s first exhibition with Anya Tish Gallery. Since receiving his masters from Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia, he’s show his work across the world. He’s had shows in Switzerland, the U.S., Spain, Canada, and Denmark.
Peter Saul
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.