This might end up as a blog post from me! Yes, I am still blog capable. This is an instance where the aesthetics of line overpower the aesthetics of representation. In Guim Tio’s work, which aims at a kind of naturalism which transitions from fashion photography to Dave McKean style painting, the circular eyes disfigure and dehumanize. Here in your drawings similarly shaped and sized eyes do not produce such a disfiguring effect. The viewer accepts the rendering as relating primarily to itself (and to the wide range of what is possible in drawing.)
This difference reminds me of two photographs I’ve had for years. One is of Rocky Dennis, the boy whose story is told in the movie MASK. The other is a photograph of a muppet. The face of the muppet has very similar proportions to Dennis’s face. In a photograph, to most people, Dennis’s face is shocking but the muppet’s appearance is perfectly human and attractive. Likewise if you look at Dennis’s face not within the norm of human faces but in the whole spectrum of faces, from lions to eels, it’s beauty becomes visible.
But that’s where the puzzle is for me: Dennis’s face appeared as it did because of a disease that eventually killed him, is it offensive to find beauty in it? Meanwhile Guim Tio’s faces present some kind of intervention in our expectations, in response to which I experience a kind of generalized estrangement and alienation. I don’t find them beautiful and I don’t believe that it is Zarraluki’s intention that I should.
But if I performed the same intervention I do in responding to Rocky Dennis’s face — which is something I do initially out of compassion — I’m not sure I could find Zarraluki’s faces beautiful. It’s this difference that puzzles me. In one case, the actual disfigurement by actual disease calls from me a response to see the human being inside the condition. In the other case, artful disfigurement of representations of faces calls from me an estranging repulsion, and I seem to experience a devaluing of humanity in general.
So maybe I will take some time and elaborate on this elsewhere. As for your drawings, I like them. They remind me of your studies of Modigliani and of that wonderful rendering of a face in the first two panels of The Weary Blues (also on the cover of Litmus Test 13).
Maybe it’s the eyes. The circular, almost cartoony eyes make the paintings very creepy. Modigliani often didn’t fill in this eyes with irises, but they often had a relatively realistic shape. On a similar note, Zarraluki’s paintings often use a similar color palette to Modigliani’s paintings, especially with the use of yellow.
My intention usually tends to be narrative, so I’m thinking about character. Hence, the more naturalistic eyes.
Your discussion of Rocky Dennis reminds me a bit of Renée French’s graphic novel The Ticking.
I don’t have much to say besides these almost tangential mutterings, it seems, but I am really interested in what you wrote and am curious to see you maybe elaborate on it.
This might end up as a blog post from me! Yes, I am still blog capable.
This is an instance where the aesthetics of line overpower the aesthetics of representation. In Guim Tio’s work, which aims at a kind of naturalism which transitions from fashion photography to Dave McKean style painting, the circular eyes disfigure and dehumanize. Here in your drawings similarly shaped and sized eyes do not produce such a disfiguring effect. The viewer accepts the rendering as relating primarily to itself (and to the wide range of what is possible in drawing.)
This difference reminds me of two photographs I’ve had for years. One is of Rocky Dennis, the boy whose story is told in the movie MASK. The other is a photograph of a muppet. The face of the muppet has very similar proportions to Dennis’s face. In a photograph, to most people, Dennis’s face is shocking but the muppet’s appearance is perfectly human and attractive. Likewise if you look at Dennis’s face not within the norm of human faces but in the whole spectrum of faces, from lions to eels, it’s beauty becomes visible.
But that’s where the puzzle is for me: Dennis’s face appeared as it did because of a disease that eventually killed him, is it offensive to find beauty in it? Meanwhile Guim Tio’s faces present some kind of intervention in our expectations, in response to which I experience a kind of generalized estrangement and alienation. I don’t find them beautiful and I don’t believe that it is Zarraluki’s intention that I should.
But if I performed the same intervention I do in responding to Rocky Dennis’s face — which is something I do initially out of compassion — I’m not sure I could find Zarraluki’s faces beautiful. It’s this difference that puzzles me. In one case, the actual disfigurement by actual disease calls from me a response to see the human being inside the condition. In the other case, artful disfigurement of representations of faces calls from me an estranging repulsion, and I seem to experience a devaluing of humanity in general.
So maybe I will take some time and elaborate on this elsewhere. As for your drawings, I like them. They remind me of your studies of Modigliani and of that wonderful rendering of a face in the first two panels of The Weary Blues (also on the cover of Litmus Test 13).
Maybe it’s the eyes. The circular, almost cartoony eyes make the paintings very creepy. Modigliani often didn’t fill in this eyes with irises, but they often had a relatively realistic shape. On a similar note, Zarraluki’s paintings often use a similar color palette to Modigliani’s paintings, especially with the use of yellow.
My intention usually tends to be narrative, so I’m thinking about character. Hence, the more naturalistic eyes.
Your discussion of Rocky Dennis reminds me a bit of Renée French’s graphic novel The Ticking.
I don’t have much to say besides these almost tangential mutterings, it seems, but I am really interested in what you wrote and am curious to see you maybe elaborate on it.