Surreal art by contemporary artists
Sergio Gervacio creates photographs that range from the ominous and unexpected to the whimsical. Strange masked men stand in the darkness, yet wearing a unicorn mask. A selfie taker’s arm clutching the phone is emerging from his open mouth.
A figure sits in a tub of milky liquid blowing bubbles, wearing a mask. A strange mermaid doll also happens to be in that tub. What does it all mean? Well, if it was obvious, he wouldn’t have to make the art.
Chris Boyko paints bizarre, strange, and unusual works. Each painting represents a hidden reality from the artist’s subconscious. These representations skirt the boundaries of surrealism and abstraction. Form and shape emerge from the paint. Nearly recognizable and figurative, yet remaining alien, beyond reach, ambiguous. Shapes or sculptures resemble figures or images found in wisps of smoke or clouds in the sky.
In Boyko’s worlds, weird alien figures (like goop) reach out and clasp each other. Are these are psychic, metaphorical structures? Crystalized memories? Microscopic organisms? Or alien landscapes? The viewer’s mind stumbles for answers… but finds weird ambiguity, and their own subconscious revelations reflected back at them.
Artist Statement
The subconscious is constructed like a giant web, which as a whole creates an individual. If one were to examine each individual piece, they would realize it’s composed of multiple ideas, memories, and feelings which are constantly shifting. It’s this shift within our subconscious that changes our perception of reality. It’s why each of us can respond differently to a multitude of situations.
Using automatic painting techniques, my mind enters a meditative state. As I begin to follow the strings of the subconscious web, the organic forms develop within the painting. One form leads to another, like a trail of thoughts. It’s as if my mind and the paint are in sync with each other. As I explore my own mind, gaining an understanding of myself; I’m also gaining an understanding of the forms.
Oils by Argentinean artist Ruben Cukier
Born and raised in Buenos Aires in 1964, Cukier chooses colors and shades that reveal a yearning for a less superficial, less deceptive reality. The forms, dimensions and colors give shape to dreams and nightmares, and even allude to a notion of hope. Humor is used to reflect fears, habits and desires that most of us deny and suppress deep within.
The dictionary defines surrealism , as a style of art and literature, stressing the subconscious or non rational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects and unexpected juxtapositions.
Ruben Cukier, surrealist painter, born and raised in politically violent Buenos Aires, is a member of an illustrious roster of artists who’s vivid imagination and fantasy informed their art making.
Visual artists from Salvador Dali, Fernando Botero , Dorothea Tanning and writers such as Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes and Franz Kafka, to name a very few, have mined the rich subconscious for imagery.
Unexpected juxtapositions that, at first, are baffling and thought provoking but when considered more closely, produce a frisson of recognition. The recognition of dreams , fears or thoughts that we ourselves may have experienced at one time or another. That is why, I feel, his paintings are so appealing . Ruben Cukiers paintings depict images and ideas that are ,not only pleasing and visually stunning, but also somehow universal and timeless.
– Lydia Schrufer, BFA.
rubencukierart.com
Nikolina Petolas is a Croatian based photographer and digital artist.
Petolas is fascinated by industrial and fantasy environments, and these form the backdrop of the mysterious worlds in her work. She creates her images using photography and digital techniques.
With over 10 years experience in photography with experience in portrait, still lifes, landscapes, and macro photography, Petolas is now intensely involved in creating complex, surrealistic photomontages.
Petolas feels a profound fascination with human behavior: with her work she attempts to highlight the psychological and social aspects of human identity. Petolas explores multiple personalities, dream-like landscapes and strange, surrealist dark creatures and environments. Her observations of inner conflict and what must be so for it to occur, inform her deeply psychological work. She is interested in the complexity of human emotion and this drives the narratives in her figurative, surrealist artwork.
Her work has been featured in numerous publications has participated in multiple group exhibitions across Europe.
Flying fish, women that rise inside an insect lair, giants pears, monstrous creatures, the world after an apocalypse… these are the images that flicker in my mind. Although these worlds may seem strange and unreachable, they contain my hopes and dreams, of people around me, their urges and desires, of new revelations and repeating disappointments, of life with its twists and turns.
My motives are sometimes dark and gloomy and often present dreamlike ambients and strange beings.
I am inspired by my surroundings and I see potential in various everyday things and relations, people, nature, architecture, even food. I see them sometimes as fragments of my work. Most of the time they remain fragments, and sometimes they become unified into a whole and therefore start to exist as a part of my sceneries.
By using real life photographs and textures I give my work a feel of realism, although the themes are far from being realistic…
Insects, animals, skeletons, strange creatures, and self-portraits guide us through these imaginary worlds.
Mostly these are leftovers of something that once lived and had its purpose. By implementing them in my environments, those odd, and often dead things and creatures tell their own story. They start to live as part of something new and in some other form.
I create surreal worlds from real life situations. These strange worlds are the flickering imagery and symbols encoded in my experiences of life, emotions, sexuality and relationships, human behavior.
Through my art I attempt to develop my personal mythology and archetypes, to make real my visions and dreams.
Luciana “Lupe” Vasconcelos is a Brazilian artist and illustrator whose art explores the realms of the mythical, mystical and occult. In her ink drawings, Vasconcelos traces the remnants of fantasy & memory in her dream-like imagery. These artworks fuse the familiar tropes of magic and myth in haunting pieces, in the tradition of 19th century Symbolism. With a dark, surrealist feel, these ink drawings create a fantastic aesthetic, channeling the occult and themes of darkness in her gorgeous hand-made illustration. By tapping into the collective symbolism of mythology, Vasconcelos creates art that is both familiar— resonating with our cultural memory— yet these poetic & haunting works of art are new, compelling, and unique.
