CHASSEUR MAGAZINE: 'Kick-Start' Interview & Feature

Check out my FEATURE & INTERVIEW for the debut issue of CHASSEUR MAGAZINE, 'Kick-Starts', Page 80-85:

http://issuu.com/chasseurmagazine/docs/the_freedom_issue_2012

Alexis Marcou: Slippery Illustrator

Let’s face it: in the context of art that’s ‘cool’, a plain portrait is boring. The unfortunate reality is that there are too many other people out there who are capable of doing exactly what you can do. Something else has to be happening. 

Over the past year, I have experimented – simply through pursuing a creative 'mistake’ I once made – with geometrical lines of distorted light. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but I’ve spotted a peculiar pattern recently with illustrators/artists (Agnes Cecille, Carne Griffiths) playing with aesthetics that replicate shattered glass, cubism and bewitching light reflections. Is there any particular reason for this trend, apart from the fact that it looks effing radical? 

And I'll tell you why this kind of style is so important today. As you’ve probably detected from my attitude towards the cretinous use of Photoshop, artists appear to be fighting back with work that defies Adobe’s determined mission to make pencils - indeed humans themselves – obsolete. Whatever you can do, I can do better.

Alexis Marcou is an inspiring saviour who makes our craft still worth persevering. His work is clearly the product of blood, sweat, and a shit load of graphite. Marcou uses an intriguing juxtaposition in his work: the monochrome becomes activated by the most minimalist traces of colour, suspending his figures between frozen stasis and explosive chaos. 

My favourite piece of his has to be ‘Noire’ (first image) though I’m sure that comes as no surprise to those of you who know his work. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s the wet-look about the piece which gets me most – and before you whine that it’s just a quick photoshop job – head over to his Process page to be proved firmly wrong. 

Such a simple image, yet that fluidity about it delivers a selection of mysterious interpretations: Is the figure frozen in time/death? Crying in the pouring rain? Drenched in blood? Marcou’s obsession with lines renders his work with a highly contemporary and virtual feel, playful with dimensions so that his finished pieces offer multiple zones of vision. Marcou's perspectives have reached vertiginous heights with commissions already from both Nike and HP.

Marcou encourages aspiring artists, "Create your own unique style. When working for clients listen but don't compromise your style." Take note - I'm currently designing a poster for a BBC film, and throughout the entire process I've been plagued with paranoia that I'm wasting my time because I'm still creating in a way which will guarantee my own aesthetic satisfaction above anyone else's. That's not selfish, right?

I'm holding you responsible, Marcou.

http://alexismarcou.com/ 

Tom French Fine Art

Thus far my experience as an artist has taught me that it can be a pretty enduring process trying to create a successful portrait which is designed purely in black and white. If you've taken a look at my own work, you'll notice that my use of high contrast often features a nice splash of colour to create some compositional balance - whatever that means. So I'm pretty green with envy when I double take at fine artist Tom French whose illusory work seems to be created exclusively from a monochromatic palette:

How do you stave off boredom when working with just two colours? I don't suppose John Virtue ever asked himself that question, but...French is interesting because he's almost like an updated and modernised version of old traditional methods with his contemporary urban realism. If you've read my previous posts, you'll already be sick of hearing that I like art that plays with opposites, contrasts, juxtapositions, contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons...Well, here's a new one: French handles a duality between the beautiful and the sinister which is in perfect equilibrium:

French studies exuberant relationships which by their very intimate gestures momentarily conjure the ultimate symbol of mortality: a human skull. But what do you see first? French's work is reminiscent of those online optical illusion games you played as a kid. But since his images are not a series of fleeting brain-bashers but permanent works of art, his illusions don't dispel. They stick, creating this eerie fixation between the living dead and the dead living: the embraced figures at once seem alive and amorous, yet the surrealist effect of the skeleton creeping through renders them ghostly and ethereal, causing the skull itself to become humanised.

It's an odd transformative effect for the viewer. For me, French isn't necessarily taking us on a painfully predictable "Oh look - it's a pretty picture but on closer inspection it's so much darker than that" journey. The 'pretty to dark' element is interchangeable: death can become life as much as life can become death. So I suppose the question it asks of you is quite simply, 'Life or Death?' In any case, French's art naturally revives ideas that life and death are closer than we think, that death is inevitable.  But since the two are so well 'balanced', there's also always a sense of rejoice in that these pieces can celebrate the value of life and togetherness in the morbid face of loss.

French's reality-bending aesthetic was recently picked up for the new custom artwork on the Donnie Darko soundtrack release. The result is wicked - it's seriously encouraging to see great young talent being recognised for large scale projects like this. 

We don't need to rely on Photoshop for everything.

http://tomfrenchart.wordpress.com/

Joram Roukes Fine Artist

Wreckface 2
2012

The artwork of Netherlands based artist Joram Roukes is a literal 'car crash' of assorted western phenomena: Roukes perhaps creates his characters with such heavily layered imagery to hint at an identity swallowed underneath the chaotic iconography of consumerism. In fact, it seems that the only thing knitting the images together is Roukes' intriguing motif of destructive and violent collision, often depicted in his drawings by upended or at least severely damaged vehicles. 

Roukes is clearly obsessed by anthropomorphism, too: his pieces frequently depict grotesque human bodies with the heads of intensely vulnerable animals, producing images which pivot between terror and hilarity. What also makes these pieces so effective is that they don't preach; Roukes doesn't necessarily go out of his way to expose the flaws of his society, but instead he observes, allowing us to determine our own position amid the insanity.

In fact, Roukes' balance between the dark and the humorous is so pitch perfect that you just don't know whether to laugh or cry. That awkward tension is where the true success of his work lies. 

It's no surprise Roukes is becoming hugely popular over here in the UK, especially with his recent solo show, Oils, at urban art gallery Signal in East London. He's got that sardonic but playful and seductive air of Antony Micallef about him, whilst still producing his own unique and robust aesthetic identity. 

He's also a really cool guy to chat with, which is a bonus. He offered me some enlightening pearls of wisdom recently about the virtual impossibility of getting galleries to notice you...Thanks mate!

In the meantime, I have no doubt we will see big movements from this guy in the future, I can quite easily see him up in the ranks with the likes of Micallef and Dan Baldwin. 

Check him out: http://joramroukes.blogspot.co.uk/

Hello "Art World"

For a very long time I have felt under immense pressure from this invisible force goading me on to create a "blog" because, as a "creator" of things, I should also be "creating" in the virtual world. Yes, I am describing myself in inverted commas because I want to dispel any pompous self-righteousness before I even get started. I'm very wary of self-aggrandising titles and I prefer to think of myself as just having a strong passion and respect for many different forms of design: from fine art to fashion design and illustration, film to creative writing. 

I have a particular appetite for anything that strikes me as unconventional, extra-ordinary, subversive, challenging, controversial, shocking. Just anything that's going to snap me - and you - out of this sad, facebook-induced state of inertness. I'd like to think that's where my art comes from. If it's shocking, fine; at least you reacted.

I'm here to document both my own artistic projects and projects emerging from the realms of art, fashion, film, and anything else that's going to make you stop and think. At times, I might talk about something that's really pissing me off (like Big Brother), but that's probably because it's already hatched as a subconscious stimulus for my next project, so hopefully it'll be worth putting up with.

Nice to meet you,

Jonny Burt.