Using transparent cloths clad to the canvas, painter Pavel Gempler creates a “second skin, through which the lower pictorial layers shine through and create an irritating doubling,” the artist says. The result is both captivating and creates a pixelated effect to his works, which then carry photograph-like benefits of the light.
“The central theme of my work is the transition of visually reproducible body and objects, which are oscillating between mystery and triviality, fullness and emptiness,” the artist tells us. “I deal with attitudes and symbols of the body, which seeks to hide in masquerades, which is a place of desire, communication and life. I work with individual expressions of the body that are degraded to the point of insignificance by the consumer society and reproducibility. In recent works, I actively intervene in the image. With this work strategy, the painted representative units are first destroyed and then reassembled under my aegis.”
See more of the artist’s work below.
Over the past few years, many of Ivy Haledeman's intimate paintings have focused on an anthropomorphic female hot dog character. The character bends and lounges across the canvas, often extending most of its form out of our view. While surely offering more erotic themes to extract, Haldedeman’s paintings also seem to be offering reflections on the capitalistic system that produces “hot dogs” themselves.
The strange worlds of 
Keya Tama is a South African artist who says he aims to "reunite old and new through contrasting yet unified iconography." Tama's talent for crafting interlocking creatures, either in the backgrounds of his paintings or in the form of murals, also recalls the work of M.C. Escher. Recently, the Los Angeles-based artist has also been collaborating with others in his pieces, such as the work with Caratoes at the jump.