Harry Paul Ally‘s paintings are primal, visceral pictures that hark back to prehistoric cave painting, to mankind’s need to make a mark, a gesture, a physical proof of existence, a acknowledgement of our place in time. As he says himself:

Painting is the primal impulse to mark. It’s a visual record of the mind, the body, and the human spirit. The works are an existential search for an abstract presence, an intuitive search into the unknown, a search for truth revealed through distortion and through exaggeration

To emphasis this physicality Ally uses a wide variety of materials including dry pigments, acrylics, tar, fabrics, oils, bonding agents and different clays from his home state of Georgia. This is work that digs down deep into the heart and soul of the artist, that constant need to expel, the urge to make a mark, to bang against the inevitability of death, to reveal the wonder of life, to make sense of something, anything.

This is a primal and artistic act of frustration. The result is a series of beautiful images that cross boundaries, that have some sort of universality that we can all understand on an intuitive level. They are a reminder of our commonality. Here’s what Ally says about his work:

The paintings allude to the beauty of decay, to violation, and to vulnerability. They are excavations, a palimpsest of surfaces layered with a variety of materials…dry pigments, acrylics, tar, fabrics, oils, bonding agents, along with different clays dug from the Georgia soil. From these materials figurative images are often unearthed. At other times paintings are often left devoid of specific visual references completely and rely solely on pure abstraction. They are surfaces that attempt to reveal a sense of time and a certain kind of depth, a depth that is both physical through build up and layering as well as emotional depth through destructive scarring. In the end the works are about a search, a search for truth and a search for correctness through the act of painting.

Gordon Douglas Ball‘s photographs are made without a camera. He’s made it redundant. Of no use. Instead he creates images by exposing 35mm and 120mm film to different light sources after which he processes and prints the results. At every stage of the artistic process he experiments with chemicals, film and light to create his beautiful images. For example in his ‘I’m So Broke’ image, seen at the top of this post, the white in the image is hair taken from his wife’s comb. After the film was processed, he re-bleached it with the hair. His wife’s chemically treated hair stained the already developed emulsion producing the green, pink and blue.

In short you could say that Ball is interested in play, in the potential for experimentation to teach, to open up endless possibilities. This is work that fundamentally challenges the role of photography, the value of the photographic image in which tradition and method have historically distinguished it as a controlled observation of literal reality. Here’s what Ball has to say about his work:

To some extent I realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. It’s figuring out how to keep living life even when life gets in the way of living. It’s establishing a sense of identity.
It’s romance. It’s chaos.

But it’s the compromises we refuse to make, and the ones we do. It’s also the simple negotiations between truth, history, and acceptance. This is about taking photography in a new direction, forward and backwards; it’s redesigning it so that it violently protests our most deeply held beliefs, and it’s making sense without any explanation. It’s changing so much that it stays the same. It’s being able to find your own independence, through alienation.

Günter Ludwig‘s ink on paper drawings are evocative compositions that bring to mind the Japanese approach to landscape wherein nature becomes a reflection of the soul, the physical reality a starting point rather than the subject of the composition. It is in this space that Ludwig works as he chases the universal truth.

Ludwig’s work is heavily influenced by his interest in Zen practices, his actions as an artist an attempt to create a simplicity that goes beyond physical representation and instead focusses on the development of a pictorial language of signs, texts and graphic teasers that ask questions about our very being, our existence.

In the same way Zen practice encourages one to empty oneself of experiences in order to open up the self up to a new reality so Ludwig does in his art, his gestures, his spontaneous mark making. In many ways Ludwig could be seen to be an artist who has spent his life working towards childhood, to that moment in time when gesture is immediate, automatic, true. As Picasso famously said:

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Sergio Cerchi‘s paintings aren’t what I’d normally post up on this blog, realistic paintings don’t excite me, but what Cerchi does in his exploration of time and colour is present us with iconographic paintings that are forever shifting, moving, mysterious. It goes beyond realism and into the realm of magic and religion, poetry and romance, cubism and symbolism.

What Cerchi attempts to achieve in each of his paintings is to marry art history – in particular the Renaissance – with his love of music and literature. Although the subject of his paintings are constructed in a rather straight forward manner his pictorial surface is anything but, rather it is fractured, broken up and realigned, each section painted in a slightly different hue, some bolder others softer, depending on the movement and angle of the fragment. The result is the fusion of a flattened hyper-realist aesthetic that references popular culture and art history with an image that is moving, shifting, peeling. Here’s what he says about his work:

Figures and geometries make his vision of reality an ethical impulse that expresses values that are both artistic, philosophical, historical and psycho-social. Subjects and backgrounds multiply in his paintings as on a music pentagram, blending horizons planes and volumes in which figures and details emerge. [For Cerchi] shades of oil paint, stony elements, sculptural forms and iconic materials from the greatest masters of Primitive art to the Renaissance, feed into the poetry and painting of Sergio Cerchi.

I really love Egor Badin’s paintings, his portraits, but I can’t find a bloody thing on him, not even a facebook page. It kills me when I come across artists and work I like but can’t find out anything about them, their lives, inspirations, process, etc. Nothing at all. Nada.

But in regards to his work Badin is without a doubt a graphic orientated artist, his colours are bold, the forms simple and strong while his brush work and use of line reminds me of the neo-expressionists of the 70′s and 80′s. Artists I love; Philip Guston, Ouattara Watts, Jean-Michel Basquiat and so on. I’d love to know more about him  - although after looking at his paintings it’s clear he loves music – and perhaps I will in time as his star rises in the art world firmament.

Matteo Varsi‘s photography lies somewhere between photography and literature, between now and then, the physical reality and a romantic vision of the world. The medium – primarily pinhole and polaroid cameras – and his use of expired instant film is merely a means to an end, to find a visual poetry in the everyday, to capture the light of a timeless space in which memories live and breathe, a place that beings to mind the sub-conscious, the ephemeral, the abstract.

Instant photography allows Varsi the opportunity to pursue the tone of his stories, the colours of his ideas and more importantly allows space for change, for accidents to happen over which he has no control. This matter of control is a fundamental part of his work. Here’s what he said about his process in Posi+tive Magazine:

[accidents] are an added value, a kind of a signature or faith sign and something out of my control. If I had everything under control, it would be so boring! Polaroid expired effects help make a picture precious, distinctive and unique. I am always analyzing how defects can become strengths. I don’t like to manipulate pictures as they develop as I am a great fatalist! The editing process takes part in my head before the shooting.

The most fascinating challenge is how to create “art” with a 5 euro plastic camera and with expired instant film. I don’t want to get closer to photography, but just lie floating in a dimension where instant is blended with photography, reality and non-reality. Polaroid gave to me this amazing chance.

While I often post up collages on this blog I’m sometimes reticent about it if only because there is a proliferation of collage art on the web. Everyone seems to be at it as it’s a good medium to have online being immediate, colourful and the images used familiar. Having said all that I love Daniel James Leznoff‘s collages for the opposite reasons.

Leznoff comes from a film background and thus his images and the manner in which he juxtaposes them are more complex, have a more surreal aspect to them than your average collage artist. He allows us to create our own narratives, our own stories from his compositions, his pictures often humorous, psychedelic and bizarre. Like many collage artists Leznoff finds his images in old library books, early print ads and family photographs but while many rely on digital processes to create their final image Leznoff relies on the old school technique of scissors and UHU glue. Here’s what he has to say about his work:

The process is simple. Find some vintage magazines or books, cut them up, play with the pieces and set them down. I might create separate piles of images: backgrounds, people, not people, text. It’s like doing a puzzle but without a guiding picture. I love Pharrell Williams, who likened his songwriting process to furnishing a living space: you know a couch should go there and if there’s a couch there then a table should be in front of it, with a vase on it…now we know where to put the lamp and the chaise-lounge. So in that regard my collage process is similar to Pharrell’s songwriting process.

Trying to keep things natural. Sometimes I’ll sit down to work and quickly throw down twenty pieces. Some of these may be added to. Other times, I may leave an unglued piece on the table for days, wondering if it’s correctly arranged. I might sweep the piece off and that’s that, but not all of my works go through this gestation process. Most are set down in a flash. If I’m working well, I might be in an automatic zone, making collage after collage. In this case, I will often try to make collages that are unlike each other. So if I do a series of pieces that feature faces, eyes or obvious focal points I will then switch gears and attempt to create something very unrecognisable.

The sole criterion: a piece must interest me in some way. Put broadly, there are a few things I need – functional backgrounds, and images of things that do not immediately make sense to me are most important. Texture and colour are essential, but there are no strict rules. If an image speaks to me I’ll use it. What I like about a given image might be difficult to articulate. Like Goethe said, “Art is an interpreter of the inexpressible, and therefore it seems a folly to try to convey its meaning afresh by means of words.”

Lekan Jeyifous‘ architectural drawings from his ‘Settlements and City Strategies’ series are a testament to his skills as an architectural technician and draughtsman as well as his sense of design and ideas about future urban spaces. His drawings are beautifully created using both geometric and organic shapes that remind me of the Nazca lines in Peru, futuristic hubs for spacecraft, charts, maps and blueprints.

What makes his drawings stand out however is the dichotomy between the digital and hand made techniques that exist in the series. Jeyifous’ drawings start out as digital images that are then outputted, sketched and drawn over and scanned back into the computer in order to be retraced, textured and layered. This mix of techniques creates an aesthetic that makes each drawing seem as if it was an historical document from some distant future relating to one not so far away. Here’s what Jeyifous has to say about the series:

The series contains abstracted planimetric drawings and eerily-serene cityscapes that suggest the changing contours of urban settlements. They represent an idea of a degenerate futurism, yet one might find similar typologies and scenes in places such as the favelas of Brazil and North Africa, and in overpopulated cities such as Lagos, Mexico City, and Mumbai. Though outputted digitally, the drawings possess a textured and painterly quality as a result of combining hand-drawn sketches, industrial textures, surfaces of deteriorated paper, and digital architectural models.

A constant interplay between digital and analog processes is important in my work, resulting in a highly layered set of documents. The drawings presented here started out as digital images that were outputted, sketched and drawn over, and scanned back into the computer in order to be retraced, textured, and layered.

Michael Cusack‘s paintings take us back into a time immemorial; of Irish land, it’s people and the topography that has embedded itself into the Irish psyche. Although he has lived in Australia for over 20 years  - Byron Bay which is a divine place to live – Cusack is still using the visual language of Ireland; the muted colours, forms, spaces, in his paintings. It’s as if painting connects him to his homeland; the rocks found in the walls of the West of Ireland, the bogs, moss, lakes and wild, cold places.

Cusack explores this terrain using subtle graphic elements – derived from his interests in architectural blueprints, boat diagrams and the interlocking shapes found in building and technical drawings – that are almost symbolic, metaphorical, his markings drawn, rubbed, smudged or scratched, his gestures suggesting connections through which we create our own narratives. Here’s what he has to say about his work on his website:

Poetry and a graphic impulse represent the cornerstone of Cusack’s practice. The poeticism is both formal and conceptual. His palette, for instance, is usually confined to nuance, with fine shifts in a pale tonal range. And his use of haloed shapes and vessels can be particularly poignant. They seem vulnerable, fragile, and become vehicles of mysterious promise, keepers of secrets and stories; no two the same.

His is a compulsive mark-maker, routinely drawing throughout the course of building ground. Graphite elements are sometimes buried, or become translucent motifs as they are filtered through the washes of overlaid paint. More often, they are an openly lyrical component of the surface of the work. The marks also act as narrative keys, like the snatches of history that a pedestrian might gather from pavements, doorways and walls. It is no accident that some of his paintings, both in the chalky quality of the finish and the seemingly random marks, recall urban details. He photographs these as reference. He will even use framing bands of contrasting colour and/or texture to accentuate a particularly sensitive area of the work and so render it path-like.

It’s always a pleasure to post up work by an Irish artist and Joshua Gordon‘s photographs are the perfect tonic after a long day looking at pictures from around the world. Having said that the images he shoots of Dublin are grim, dark and gritty, they are pictures of life on the edge, the last vestiges of a party.

Even though Gordon is well known in urban fashion circles he has a strong interest in documentary photography and its in this arena that we get a glimpse of Dublin, of a city falling into ruin, a place decimated – like the rest of the country – by greed, corruption and inequality.

As someone big into hip hop and electronica Gordon’s urban influences transcend photography and after his photo blog, FucknFilthy, took off he set up his own fashion label. Since then his star has been rising in both Ireland and abroad for both his striking pictures and cutting-edge design. Here’s what he has to say about his pictures:

I’m just trying to create strong, timeless photos, and I’m nowhere near that point yet. I haven’t been consistently working hard enough on it to get to that level, to the level I hope to take it one day, of just really strong, gritty, intense photographs that people can look at in 50 years and think: ‘Fuck, how did that image come about?