Illustration

Frenzied Symbols and Vibrant Vignettes Overlay Sam Rodriguez’s Figurative Illustrations

Sam Rodriguez sorts his works into three categories: nouns, verbs, and typography. Nouns comprises his portraits that zero in on a singular person and their expressions, while verbs takes a step back to portray figures in action. Typography is more abstract and centers on letterforms and graphics informed by Rodriguez’s early forays into graffiti.

These classifications help the San José-based illustrator “bring order to the chaos of making art,” freeing him to focus on the stories he wants to tell. Employing bold, chromatic palettes, Rodriguez superimposes symbols, signs, typography, cartoons, and patterns atop his subjects as a means of expression. The frenzied additions visualize the sitters’ unseen preoccupations and interests, whether it be a childhood love for Dragon Ball or verdant, cabbage-like clusters sprouting from a figure’s eyes.

In addition to his personal projects, Rodriguez has worked with dozens of brands including Adobe and The New Yorker and is currently collaborating with the estate of MF Doom on a collection to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MM…FOOD. He also recently released Human 2.0: A Celebration of Human Bionics with author Patrick Kane, a richly illustrated book about the incredible advancements in medical engineering.

You can find an archive of Rodriguez’s work and follow his upcoming projects on Instagram.

 

Art

Using the Building Blocks of Myers-Briggs, Jason Boyd Kinsella Puzzles Together an Expressive Cast

“For me, the studio is a place of discovery,” says Jason Boyd Kinsella (previously). “It maybe sounds silly, but it’s a little bit like a Christmas morning when you get a gift, and you’re excited to open it because you don’t know what’s inside… Something is going to be revealed, and I am excited to see what it is.”

The unexpected encounters Kinsella describes arise naturally in his Oslo studio as he conjures enigmatic characters. Large-scale canvases—his preferred size is 20 x 100 centimeters—line the walls of the airy, industrial space and allow him to envision life-sized figures he confronts as he paints. This positioning creates a sort of dialogue between the two, which he approaches with openness and curiosity as if meeting someone for the first time.

Kinsella often begins with a rough, preliminary sketch that pulls on a few emotional threads and helps to lay the foundation for a temperament to emerge. “Looking back at (the sketches), very often I’m struck with the feeling that the person I’m looking at in one of these drawings is someone that’s very familiar to me. It’s really about discovering feeling as opposed to being super rational,” he adds.

 

Like a jazz musician who practices improvisation and gains confidence in spontaneity, Kinsella has learned to follow his intuition. He might layer a pair of bubblegum pink planks or bisect a face with two peach columns, decisions that, like chord progressions and syncopation in an unrehearsed run, are made more interesting by their surrounding components. “You can look at sheet music and understand the individual notes themselves,” the artist says, “but it’s only when they’re assembled and played that you really get the true magic of it.”

He constructs a persona in the way that many of us build the public-facing identities flooding our social media profiles. His figures are complex but not messy, their feelings compartmentalized in perfectly round spheres and angled forms. Based on the 16 possible outcomes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, the subjects fit into neat constructions that resemble something familiar but are uniquely puzzled together, each shape nested into an individual spot.

The artist first encountered the personality test after his mother gifted him a book with the questions when he was growing up in Toronto. He answered the prompts and recognized himself in the outcomes: his introversion, intuition, and empathy were all easily identifiable. “There was this realization that we’re all made up of the same stuff, right? All of these simple components are very interchangeable depending on how you answer these questions,” he says. Although he didn’t think much about the book after that, it followed him around and slowly seeped into his practice, eventually becoming the backbone of his work.

 

Earlier this year, Kinsella opened Emotional Moonscapes at Perrotin in New York, where his painted portraits were on view alongside sculptures and video. In addition to singular figures, pairs of people appeared in this show for the first time. “The Twins” depicts siblings in pink and blue plainly conjoined by a horizontal bar, while “Connection” is more eager and complicated. Two seated characters inch forward in hopes of interacting, only to find the other just out of reach.

Like realistic portraits, these abstract personalities aren’t static. Experiences offer new perspectives, and over time, our understandings of ourselves and the world shift. Kinsella’s “Mille” portraits draw on the inevitability of change and portray a figure at varying points in life. The first in the series features a disjointed face that plays outward, while the second is tightly constructed, the same shapes rearranged into a recognizable but new configuration.

Stripping away outward appearances in favor of fundamentals, Kinsella looks to emotional DNA, how it sequences within an individual and replicates over time. As Max Lakin writes about the body of work, the artist’s “presence wrapped up in his pictures… a feeling that hangs between the shapes.” The portraits suggest that intimacy is about filling in the gaps and finding space where connections flourish. “If you want to know what’s happening in my life, just look at my work. I’m baked into every single piece,” Kinsella says.

In August, he will open his next exhibition, Ghost in the Machine, at Perrotin in Seoul. Until then, find more of his work on his website and Instagram.

 

Art Books Photography Social Issues

Artist and Activist Zanele Muholi Grapples with Exposure in a New Monograph

Following their lauded 2018 monograph, South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi has released a second book collecting the most recent additions to their series, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness. Volume II features 80 self-portraits shot in Muholi’s signature saturated black and white along with writings by ten contributors and a long-form interview.

Often adorned in objects like cameras or aluminum can tops that are common to the locations they visit, the artist centers themself in each image and returns the gaze to the viewer, a radical act as a Black queer person. “My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance—existence as well as insistence,” they said about the series.

Edited by Renée Mussai and published by Aperture, Volume II reflects on how Muholi’s portraits subvert art historical traditions and respond to the current moment. The book largely contains works taken after the onset of COVID-19, and therefore, many portraits incorporate essential goods like masks and water jugs. Capturing a particularly traumatic time, the photos are a striking and poignant reminder that the human body is vulnerable and worth safeguarding.

Ideas about protection arise frequently, as in works like “Baveziwe I,” which means “exposed to” in Zulu and portrays them swathed in thick fabric, just their face visible. “Taking charge of my representation is one way of dealing with the inevitability of exposure. You think you are covered, but you are not. We are always exposed,” Muholi says in the book. The series “is my way of creating and activating a space of photographic shelter, a personal archive.”

Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness: Volume II is available on Bookshop.

 

Art Nature

Verdant Landscapes and Burgeoning Plants Crawl Across Walls in ONIRO’s Vibrant Anatomical Murals

Greenery abounds in the large-scale murals of Italian artist ONIRO, who often focuses on themes of interconnectedness and balance, especially between humans and the natural world. In “Coltivazione del Sé,” or “self-cultivation,” a human form emerges from the leaves and shadows of a burgeoning plant, while an opening of sky between branches reveals a facial silhouette in an untitled mural on an olive oil processing workshop.

In 2022, ONIRO completed an ambitious series that links three neighboring communities along the Via Aurelia, an ancient Roman artery in Italy constructed around 241 B.C.E. that remains a busy commercial thoroughfare today. “Each mural is a necessary part for the others, like organs that form an organism, and which as a whole has a greater value than the sum of the individual parts,” the artist says.

The three pieces in Organismo, or “body,” are composed in a loose, painterly style to depict Gaia—the ancient Greek goddess who personified the earth—an island shaped like the human heart, and a peninsula shaped like lungs with flowing, bronchial inlets. Explore more on Behance and Instagram.

 

Sponsor

IED Firenze Launches a New Master Course in Future Store Design

When you decide to buy something, there are many key factors involved. Customer experience has become one of the most relevant aspects to consider when designing a retail journey, whether physical, digital, or both. It’s time to define how retail spaces will evolve in the next years and to do so, Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) Firenze just launched a brand-new Master Course in Future Store Design. 

In an era marked by rapid change, the course imparts essential knowledge and the skills required to design effective retail spaces, recognizing the profound shifts in this domain. The dynamic interplay between physical and digital has become increasingly integral to our daily lives. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores now serve as focal points for hybrid experiences, seamlessly integrating online and offline elements through omnichannel services.

 

Delivered entirely in English, the Master Course features celebrated Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos as a Mentor. With more than three decades of experience and a diverse portfolio spanning monumental sculptures and immersive installations, she brings a wealth of expertise to the program. Having exhibited in several prestigious venues worldwide, including at the Uffizi Galleries and Pitti Palace in Florence, Vasconcelos’s international acclaim underscores the caliber of mentorship students can anticipate. Characterized by the recontextualization of everyday objects and a penchant for challenging societal norms with wit and irony, her distinctive perspective promises to enrich students’ educational journeys. 

Geared toward postgraduate students proficient in design elements with creative and visual skills, the Master Course in Future Store Design seeks to redefine the future of retail spaces. With an ambitious mission to equip a new generation of designers with a keen focus on future trends and the challenges posed by innovation, this program at IED Firenze cultivates ideas that resonate with market demands and caters to the evolving needs of brands and consumers. 

Mentors like Vasconcelos play a pivotal role in guiding students through the ever-evolving challenges of the industry. By sharing their expertise and insights, they prepare students for the competitive landscape awaiting them upon course completion. Coordinators Imma Matera and Tommaso Lucarini, founders of the design studio Tipstudio, ensure a seamless learning experience by leveraging their expertise and extensive network within the design industry.

 

With a specialized focus on the customer experience, students will gain an understanding of the importance of materials to generate sensorial exchange or immersive installations to create immediate connections. Now that the boundaries between functionality and aesthetics are blurred, technology and craftsmanship must join hands in these future spaces to respond to consumer expectations. As such, Florence is an ideal setting for this course, with Vasconcelos and Tipstudio Studio well-suited as its leaders.

The Master Course in Future Store Design at IED Firenze represents a new opportunity for aspiring designers to learn from industry luminaries and shape the future of retail environments. With a curriculum designed to foster creativity, innovation, and critical thinking, graduates will be well-equipped to make significant contributions to the ever-evolving realm of design.

For more information, visit ied.edu.

 

Art

In ‘Zoophites,’ Les Lalanne Hybridize Beasts and Botany into Functional Sculptures

Now obsolete, the term zoophytes once referred to organisms that exhibited both animal and plant characteristics. It’s also an apt title for a poetic exhibition of sculptures blending beastly and botanical forms by the late Claude (1925-2019) and François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008).

On view at Kasmin in New York, Zoophites brings together dozens of surrealist works from the French artists, known together as Les Lalanne, that bridge the divide between kingdoms. Included are iconic pieces like François-Xavier’s “Grand Chat polymorph,” a ten-foot cat with a tail fin and wings that open up to reveal a fully functional bar cart, and a similarly multi-purpose bull whose bronze belly flips open like a small desk. Having worked as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Louvre, the artist often referenced ancient mythology and hybridity in his figures.

While François-Xavier gravitated toward the animal, Claude was drawn to the plant world. Oversized ginkgo leaves line “Les Berces adossées,” an elegant bench with four fan-shaped seats. The pair lived together but tended to work separately, and their rare collaborations maintain both of their natural affinities. “Gorille consolé,” for example, features a seated primate by François-Xavier that grasps branches by Claude.

As its name suggests, that glass-top piece is made to hold objects, and some curators and critics struggled to classify the duo’s works because of such functionality. “It was difficult to be accepted in the art world,” Claude said. “We used to have a lot of trouble because we made useful things and made them ourselves. This is automatically considered as so called ‘decorative arts,’ a lesser, secondary art.”

Zoophites borrows its title from a 1964 show in Paris that was the first the pair presented together and is on view through May 9. For more about Les Lalanne, visit Kasmin.