Using just a pencil and paper, Nicola Alessandrini crafts striking, surreal imagery that explore the subconscious. The Italy-born artist creates scenes in which intimate figures are unraveled, producing strange growths and stripped of their normal defenses. Gender and sexuality also often play a role in Alessandrini’s works, as well as totems from childhood.
“We are multiform and complex entities in which instinct, reason, guilt and atavistic genetic limits are mixed in a confused way; we are also incomplete and fallacious beings, in a stage of unfinished and spoiled evolution,” a statement says. “Nicola’s works, visible both in streets and galleries, are often intrusive, uncomfortable and deeply destabilizing images that interweave science and popular culture, folklore and everyday life.”
See more of Alessandrini’s drawings below.