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.
Randy Ortiz’s stirring drawings adorn gallery walls and album covers, each showing the artist’s knack for horror and surrealism. Works such as “Rejoice, for Tonight It Is a World That We Bury” (below) offer disconcerting narratives in progress, rendered in graphite.
The intricate drawings of Ben Tolman are featured in a new show at Jonathan Levine Projects in New Jersey. “New Drawings” collects works that emphasize the artist’s talents in conveying varying structures, textures, and approaches. The show runs through July 21 at the space. The artist last appeared on this site here.
Colombia-based illustrator Alejandro García Restrepo is known for crafting strikingly realistic and strange drawings, often playing with the contours of natural objects to create surprising flourishes. Though many of his works have been illustrative in nature, they often stand alone as stirring works.
Brandon Locher is a New York-based visual artist and musician with a prolific output in both areas. His “Mazes to the Motherlode” portfolio contains 50 pieces of art created over the past few years. These ink and graphite labyrinths differ in approach and convolution, yet all are alluring in their intricacies.
Illustrator Zoe Keller‘s absorbing, hyperdetailed odes to the natural world are rendered in graphite and ink. The Portland-based artist uses landscapes, field guides, and her own memories to source the varied flora and fauna that appear in her works. The artist says that she blends “hints of narrative” into her natural explorations.