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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
In the work of Lucas Lasnier, also known as PARBO, geometric forms collide with and infiltrate our reality. Whether adorning a wall or a page, Lasnier’s penchants for both the abstract and the realistic are at play. And Lasnier’s background in urban art comes through even in his more commercial ventures.
Emile Morel’s mythological scenes have an ancient quality, despite being primarily rendered through digital means. Much of his work offers both whimsy and the fantastical, his hybrid creatures often towering over their child counterparts. Morel was last mentioned on our site here.
In Erika Zolli's "A Little Known Marble" series, she blends mediums by photographing monochromatic marble sculptures from Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan and digitally adding "the typical color of ancient sculptures,” fighting against any notion that the “classical world was devoid of color.”
Using 3D scanning, artist Frederik Heyman created “virtual embalmings,” in which digitally crafted memorials are curated by their subjects. In this series, created for the Nowness program "Define Beauty," he “embalmed” fashion and entertainment figures Isabelle Huppert, Kim Peers and Michèle Lamy with their careful input.
Whether as still portraits or in motion, the mutants and forms created by Erik Ferguson are disconcerting in their realistic textures. The artist moves between high-profile and personal project, working on the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy and live performances for Rihanna. With assignments like album artwork for The Horrors, the artist's own sensibilities come through even more.
Shamus Clisset, who works under the moniker Fake Shamus, crafts all-digital works that only appear to be sourced from photographs. Taking inspiration from pop culture, historical objects, and other Western elements, he creates figures and scenes with unclear origins. His practice touches modeling, rendering, and animation.
Parker S. Jackson says he tries to strike a balance between "uncanny and realism" in his portraits, which carry notes of both humor and dark art. One of the artist’s greatest strengths is in his ability to create varying, perplexing textures with both digital and traditional materials. We asked the artist about his influences, which he says range from centuries-old work to contemporary pop culture.
In Tokyo's Odaiba district, the world's biggest museum dedicated to interactive digital art is now open. The Digital Art Museum opened by Mori Building and teamLab has 107,000 square feet, with simulations created by 470 projectors and 520 computers.
Tishk Barzanji plays with architecture and perspective in pastel-hued landscapes. The mixed-media works use both digital and photographic techniques to create these absorbing, yet off-kilter explorations. The use of varied sources takes the viewer in and far out of reality within a single work.
Combining disciplines in make-up effects, costuming, and digital manipulation, Salvia has amassed an enormous following with what’s been labeled as “alien glamour.” The Wales native’s work has primarily lived on Instagram, where the artist’s work has become more fantastical over the past two years. From this outlet, collaborations have sprung with the likes of photographer Nick Knight and jeweler Chrishabana.
Artist Mike Campau combines photography and digital techniques for his “Antisocial” series, a project that takes a pointed look at digital platforms we use to communicate. For much of the work, there’s a cynical beauty in the details, with letter boards reflecting our frivolous behavior and dependency on social media. In a statement, he offers some insight into the series:
The flamboyant, eye-popping works of digital artist Kota Yamaji carry touches of psychedelia and surrealism. Using both stills and motion work, his pieces blend textures and patterns to absorbing effect. The Tokyo-based artist has also created music videos for tilt-six and INNOCENT in FORMAL.
Chilean photographer and visual artist Jon Jacobsen works within the tension of the real and the fabricated in his digitally manipulated works. The artist has recently explored this with make-up artist Alex Box, dancer Jonathon Luke Baker, and director Nick Knight in a film created during his SHOWstudio residency. Their “Die Verwandlung” film "encompasses a fashion film, editorial and process imagery exploring metamorphosis and motion, informed by Jacobsen's interest in the dichotomy between digital and organic states.”
James Jean’s fantastical acrylic paintings and digital works are absorbing, even if viewers aren’t offered a specific storyline for each work. In his latest works, the artist packs even more abstraction, hues, and icons into these tales. Often, his paintings offer surreal interplay between humans and the animal world. Jean was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
Tel-Aviv-based artist Ori Toor creates prints and animations that rely on happy accidents. His so-called “gibberish” prints are unplanned and unsketched. These vibrant, trippy works merely stumble upon familiar icons and forms, creating final products that both exhibit a single vibe and can be seen as disparate, otherworldly sections.
Antony Crossfield, an artist based in London, manipulates his photographs to create new ways of looking at our natural forms. Series like “Second Skin” take the outer shell of the human body and pushes it outside of the boundaries of superficiality. It’s in these exercises that Crossfield aims to “to present the body not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits, but as an organ of physical and psychical interchange between bodies.”
Max Guther, a 25-year-old illustrator living in Germany, Guther creates “digital collages by transforming photographic material, textures and self-constructed objects.” The artist uses a top-down perspective reminiscent of computer games of yesterday, offering both a voyeuristic and broad point of view. In a series of illustrations titled "The Goodlife," Guther explores the balance of relaxation, work, and "social environment."
Chad Knight’s vibrant digital art moves between the meditative and the frenetic. A 3D designer with Nike by the day, the artist’s personal work seems to exist in alien worlds, with his works being made in Cinema 4D. These are places inhabited enormous, elaborate beings that appear in mid-evolution. The artist posts a new creation each day on his Instagram account, part of an ongoing, prolific effort.
Russian artist Uno Moralez crafts images that are a throwback to seemingly less sophisticated, earlier days of digital art. Yet, what the artist has done is forge a novel, fascinating way to communicate narrative. They’re not quite comics, yet Moralez often depends on more than one image to share his stories, which move between pulp, campy horror, sci-fi, or something stranger and dream-like.
Jean-Michel Bihorel, a Paris-based digital artist, crafts bewildering illustrations of otherworldly figures and scenes. These creatures can have a natural make-up, like floral collections or delicate landscapes, or they seem entirely alien. Bihoral works as a CG supervisor for Mécanique Générale and is a co-founder and mentor of CreativeSeeds, a training school for aspiring animators.
Jun Seo Hahm is a Seoul-based digital animator and designer, known for his delightful fictional creatures that inhabit other worlds. Much of the artist’s work is rooted in his lifelong fascination with the scientific field of biology. In an interview with the publication Massage, he says he actually considers himself to be a reverse-biologist. Instead of studying real creatures in the natural world, he creates new ones and worlds for them to inhabit.
“Subway Doodle” is the name Ben Rubin uses when posting drawings he makes on his commute to and from work each day. The artist snaps a photo and using his iPad, he inserts monsters, animals, and occasionally horrifying scenes into everyday life. Sometimes, the fictional creatures soak in the banality of the subway with fellow passengers. Other times, unsuspecting passengers are unaware of the terror that sits next to them.
For almost a decade, Beeple has sat down every day and made something. The digital artist uses a variety of programs and apps for his Everydays Project, an ongoing series of works uploaded to the artist's site every day. Beeple is the moniker of artist Mike Winkelmann, who describes himself as making “a variety of art crap across a variety of media.”
"Void Season" is a different kind of fashion project that makes us excited to see how the future of fashion is going to look. What first appears as an eccentric, simulated dance and a color-coordinated Tumblr exploration turns out to be a study of algorithmic textiles and procedural surfaces. This digital magic was created by the Berlin, Germany based design studio known as Zeitguised. Their mesmerizing visuals are crafted as a unique blend of tantalizing design, handmade algorithms and bespoke generative processes.
Magnus Gjoen’s digital works make us look twice to grasp their meaning. He wants us to see in a different light, being it weapons, animals or the human race itself. Gjoen's unique style of juxtaposing themes of religion, war, beauty, and destruction in his art, featured on our blog here, bring us to also question their correlation.
Tokyo based collective known as teamLab describe themselves as "ultra-technologists", artists who seek to merge art, technology and design in their work, designed to allow viewers to have a more personal and unique connection with art. With Japanese designer Toshiyuki Inoko at the helm, the collective's installations are nothing short of magical- featured here on our blog, they are a spontaneous experience where artworks come to "life" as animation when approached by visitors. The secret to the magic behind their work is motion sensors that pick up the viewer’s movements, prompting paintings of the natural world to become a blooming and wilting garden of delights. Pace Art + Technology in Silicon Valley, California, seeking to create an environment that encourages educational play, invited teamLab to join their Future Park series- the result of which is "Living Digital Space and Future Parks" opening on February 6th.
Moscow, Russia based artist Tatiana Plakhova is fascinated by universal concepts which are at the core of her futuristic works. Her approach is purely analytical, designing luminous landscapes using precise geometric lines. Created entirely in Adobe Illustrator, she calls these "infographic drawings", reflecting on how we collect information about the world around us. In her statement, Plakhova writes, "This mathematical style helps me to illustrate everything from biological cell to the space and meditative worlds. That’s why I admire math, because it’s everywhere and nowhere."
Canadian multimedia artist Jon Rafman often explores the boundaries between our real lives and our virtual lives. Working primarily in digital media, his works illustrate a modern sense of reality through humour and irony. He is perhaps best known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View, titled "9-Eyes". In his ongoing series "Brand New Paint Job", Rafman re-appropriates famous paintings by contemporary artists into the 3D digital realm.
For his latest series, French photographer and digital artist Cal Redback has created slightly unsettling portraits of people fused with nature. Many of his subjects are inspired by those of fantasy and horror, as in his version of "Treebeard" of The Lord of the Rings or "Hellraiser". Redback adds a plant-like appearance to his own characters by photographing them and then digitally manipulating the image in Photoshop. Botanicals sprout from their cheeks and eye sockets in beautiful and sometimes painful looking displays, even more alarming by their casual demeanor.
Los Angeles based artist Steve Kim creates haunting, colorful digital and ink illustrations mostly inspired by his virtual experiences. The majority of his pieces focus on a variety of modern themes, some sounding straight out of science fiction, including body possession to portraits of users that catch his eye on Tumblr. His interest in this type of subject matter undoubtedly rubs off of his professional work for clients such as tech blog Polygon and the Verge. See more after the jump!