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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Look down. Hiding between sidewalk cracks and under train tracks, you just might find one of the people who inhabit Joe Iurato's miniature world. The New York-based artist cuts people from wood and photographs them in active positions within cities and landscapes. The resulting photographs are endearing miniature reflections of the world. By placing his cutouts in familiar settings, Iurato draws attention to the details in our greater environment. Furthermore, by painting the works in black-and-white, the artist creates a sense of nostalgia, especially around his portraits of men walking along train tracks.
Israeli artist Nir Hod once told Interview Magazine, his greatest discovery was that "it's not easy getting older." In his painting series "Genius," Hod pulls at the tension between childhood and adulthood and breaks open a space in between innocence and inurement. His images are of young children smoking cigarettes and looking at the viewer with expressions of disdain, arrogance and suspicion. Though there is certainly an element of dark humor in dressing rosy-cheeked toddlers in rich fabrics and endowing them with sweeping hair, the paintings are disquieting for their ability to reflect one's now-corrupted inner child back unto him.