Profound visions of poverty through paintings

Don’t Shed No Tears - 24″x36″, Acrylics on Canvas © 2004-2008

Today is Blog Action Day - a day where thousands of bloggers around the world commit to write on the one topic in the hope of creating awareness around that issue. The topic this year is Poverty, and what better way to shed alittle ALOT of light on this terrible human condition than through the provocative ‘hyperealistic’ paintings of Denis Peterson. Being acknowledged as the pioneer and primary architect of hyperrealism which was founded upon the aesthetic principles of Photorealism. Denis was one of the first photorealist painters to emerge in New York, creating realistic scenes and portraitures rendered in meticulous detail. Many of his paintings depict homeless and African people in scenes that confront the human condition. “By making something beautiful and hyperreal in appearance, I think he attempts to remind us that people suffering terribly are living, breathing, thinking, and feeling individuals in need of our attention and help (Chris Ashley, Look See).”

Visually disturbing subjects of this iconoclastic artist have been statuesque figures and stoic faces painted in an eerily and deafening hyper-reality. His subjects are universally depicted with an internalized calm in the face of the surrounding horrors of deadly disease, impending torture, terrorizing fear, irrational hatred and saddening poverty.

There’s not much more to say that the paintings don’t say themselves. They are extraordinary paintings from an extraordinary artist. Follow the jump to see more…

Self Portrait - 2003. 70 x 60 x 12 cm - silicone, pigment, hair, fabric - Self Portrait is a fully three-dimensional,
but spatially compressed, wall sculpture. It appears distortion-free only when viewed directly from the front.

Evan Perry alongside Aerial #2 - 2006, 269 x 152 x 33 cm - silicone, pigment, hair, aluminum

Evan Penny’s eccentric portraiture transforms the figurative tradition into contemporary observations on the nature of representation. His lifelike sculptures and photographs tantalize us with vivid allusions to reality, while emphatically affirming their fictional demeanor. When faced with one of Penny’s incredible people, we may not believe what we see. - Joe Houston

Working in a similar ‘hyper-realistic’ sculptural style to Ron Mueck,Canadian artist Evan Penny creates some very realistic molded and dye-painted silicone figures, implanting real hair one strand at a time. His figures are mostly head-and-shoulders busts at twice life size or larger. Penny’s technique for these is very similar to artists such as Mueck and other artists who make props for movies; constructing molds for the silicone by modeling clay by hand. These are meticulously-detailed through the painstaking creation of body imperfections such as scars, blemishes - these offer Penny an exploration into human corporeality and fallibility. Interestingly, Penny combines facial characteristics from a variety of sources to create composite portraits. Accompanying photographs (as in the L. Faux series) emphasize the difference between the visual information we believe to be authentic and what actually exists in space. more…

Octopus. 1994. Acrylic on board. 21 x 29 inches.

“Art is a kind of tenacity, an insistence upon asserting your own originality.” / “By contrast, superrealism deals with the technical issue of how close one can get to one’s object.” / “Unlike art, illustration is not a matter of emotion or hatreds, but an experience that comes naturally through logical thinking.” - Hajime Sorayama

Hajime Sorayama is an illustrator of super-realistic pin ups, erotic art and robot / cyborg type imagery. Born and based in Japan, Soryama has been working independently as a freelance illustrator since 1972. Since then, he has been perfecting his own super-realistic illustration techniques and skills that require the use of a very fine brush, pencil, acrylic paint and the airbrush to complete finishing details. In part, this level of craftmanship and meticulous attention to detail has given him the description as one of the most significant erotic artists of the 20th century. It is hard to disagree with the claims, since his sensual, innovative, mythical, futuristic, memorable and hyper-realistic style has been significantly taking erotic art to completely new levels…

Ophelia. 1994. Acrylic on board. 21 x 29 inches.

Sorayama’s highly detailed art is featured in movies, TV, books, magazines and ads. In December, his original illustrations will be on show at Artspace Gallery - at Art Now Fair in Miami. For more info, visit Sorayama’s site. You might also want to view a selection of my (NSFW) favorites after the jump. more…

He so nearly captures that extra bit, what we call the soul or spirit, that flame inside that makes us ourselves. He takes one to the very edge of the idea of life, calls into question what it is to be a person, what it is to be human. - Marina Warner.

• Ron Mueck

Ron Mueck is an Australian hyper-realist sculptor working in the UK. His incredible sculptures of creepy, grotesque, mottled skin and uncannily gigantic proportional figures have adorned the Millennium Dome as well as Charles Saatchi’s living room for a number of years now. It would be fair to say, Mueck’s one of the leading contemporary artists of today.

His early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s television and films, notably the film “Labyrinth” staring Bowie. Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. This eventually led him to conclude, “photography pretty much destroys the physical presence of the original object”, and so he turned to fine art, in particular, sculpture. more…