Carlo Alberto Rastelli, a painter who lives work works in Milan, blends an off-kilter palette and perspective with unexpected textures to explore humanity and art history. His works can feel at once intimate and otherworldly in how they approach depth and form. The painter attended the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Riga.
“Every new painting I make starts from a visual suggestion: It can be about a new material, like the fir wood panel I use for my last works,” the artist says. “It can be connected to a personal experience, like the forest landscapes I use to paint lately, after my erasmus in Latvia. Sometimes it comes from a picture or a frame from a sci-fi movie. My artistic research aims at personal and contemporary reinterpretation of the most important topics in the history of art (landscape and portrait) through an equally classic technique (painting). I try to achieve this goal mixing different tecniques (oil, acrylic, collage and gold leaf), supports (canvas and wood) and artistic influences (David Hockney, Lucain Freud, Peter Doig, John Currin, but also “extra-artistic” inspirations, such as cinema, literature and comics).”
See more of his work below.
Oil painter and performance artist John Robinson crafts cerebral, wistful, and, at times, humorous self-portraits. His works, often rendered in monochromatic tones, sees the artist donning masks and contraptions that speaks to his current reflections. Elsewhere, he re-imagines moments of art history through his distinct filter.
Justin Lovato
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.