Polish artist Jacek Yerka's paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons' mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
Polish artist Jacek Yerka’s paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons’ mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
With his dreamlike, ink-on-paper renderings of mystical rivers, mountains and forests, Cuban artist Rubén Fuentes aims to recapture the grandeur and power of nature at a time when our planet's ecosystems are in their most vulnerable state. Borrowing from the concepts and aesthetics of Chinese and Japanese shan-shui and sumi-e brush painting, Fuentes uses a combination of spontaneous and detail-oriented brush work to depict vast landscapes and overgrown structures in an attempt to "return to nature what has been taken away" by generations of human destruction.
There seems to be a history running through Carmel Seymour’s water colors, but it’s hard to pin down. Somewhere in the hazy but sublime gap between art and illustration, the paintings suspend an alternate reality in the canvas’ mid-air, depicting some hyperreal folklore in a wash of negative space. Seymour’s conceit seems simple enough: she places contemporary figures, such as girls in jeans and sneakers, in some private oasis, perhaps the figures’ dream landscape or perhaps some alien planet. But the landscapes where her figures exist are not so much 'scapes as objects; entities without a before or after. Her water colors are deployed in highly restrained and linear strokes to focus on details, and then exploded to disrupt the hyperrealism and maximize the medium’s atmospheric emphasis. The paintings have no clear beginning or end, but beg the question: what’s the story here?
Colombia-born illustrator Daniela Gallego crafts intimate, whimsical illustrations that move between the fantastic and the deeply human. She has created pieces for children's books and commercial clients while crafting her own gallery work. For effect, the artist often uses reflections and shadows to add a wondrous quality to her images.
In illustrator David Álvarez’s recent charcoal works, the night is a character that walks the countryside. “I Dreamed I Was the Night” is the name of that latest series, a collection that will presumably comprise another story for the Mexico-based artist.
