Julien Spianti is a French painter and filmmaker who merges classical figure painting with impressionistic landscapes. His work often appears to be mid-transformation, with some portions fragmented and others well-rendered. He cites dreams as an inspiration for the lack of clarity in his work. 

Embarquement, 2013

Spianti is interested in portraying the blending of myth and reality as it has been throughout human history. I enjoy that there is a romantic quality to his impressionist style and well-rendered nudes that is at odds with more modern techniques such as his fragmented compositions, unsmoothed brushstrokes, and washed-out lighting you might expect from a non-idealized studio setting. 

Open Source, 2014

His method of painting thinly, incompletely covering his canvases, is one of my favorite aspects of his work; I feel that the artist studies what he wants to from his subjects until he feels his point has been made. The paintings feel skilled and academic but not overworked due to perfectionist objectives.

LOVE IN SETTLEMENT, 2011

Justin Mortimer is a British painter who explores the visceral psychological turmoil of humankind. His imagery comes from photographs that he finds online or in books, which he cobbles together in a collage to be used as reference. What he chooses to paint is most often disturbing, the horrifying realism of his subjects pairing with impressionist marks that obscure and fragment their original contexts.

Family Dollar, 2009

My first impression of Mortimer's work was more focused on the physical than the psychological. The strange gravity of viewing corpses, abandoned facilities, and even just nude figures captured with unflattering flash photography isn't too different from the emotional weight of war photojournalism or crime scene photos. The "narratives" in his paintings may be imaginary, but his sources are not, and I find it impossible to discard the idea of their original contexts in favor of his new composition.

To combat this, Mortimer attempts to separate his paintings from their sources by "redaction." "I imagine screen writing is similar; the less you know about the character the more you want to know - my pictures have no voice over." In partially obscuring things or keeping them off frame, he preserves a sense of mystery and anticipation that doesn't explain too much of what's happening.

Tract, 2012

Mortimer also feel there's a universality in his work that relates to more general concepts of fear, conflict, and loss than specific human conflicts: he calls his scenes "paranoid landscapes" and keeps his figures faceless to show their disconnection from their surroundings, ultimately trying to depict a break down of sanity, peace, and rationality.  

"What makes me want to make art in my studio in a dingy part of East London is that story I want to tell about our fears, our anxieties, how afraid we all are, how we’re all going to die. Are we going to go mad? Am I going to lose my job? Is my body going to fail? Will my loved ones not be around for me? There’s sort of an existential anger—not to sound pretentious—but there is an anger I have in me that drives my work."

Jockey Club, 2007

Mortimer's work is depressing, scary, violent, and very real, and I think that's what attracts me to his paintings in an uncomfortable kind of way; I don't like them but I enjoy that they are scary, morbid, and different from what I'm used to seeing. Even if I don't believe there's any intellectual brilliance to his ideas, I can't help their emotional impact.

The artist himself is very aware that this kind of vouyerism is a common interest among his fans; "I do know that if you scratch the surface of us all you'll find a huge appetite for violence, cruelty, for the subversive and the deviant. Our dark, innate impulse for brutalism is a preoccupation that continually feeds my work."

Der Besucher, 2014

Nicole Eisenman is an American artist who works in a variety of mediums from sculpture to prints and paintings. She explores a range of political issues in her work but tries to stay current, starting with works about homosexuality and then moving into topics like racial, class and gender inequalities. She makes a point of saying she tired of one-off political jokes in the early 2000s, but satire definitely remains a part of her contemporary pieces.

Coping, 2008

One of the most striking parts of Eisenman's work is the sense of community created by her diverse casts of characters. Imaginative abstractions appear alongside the artist herself and her friends, this living world of individuals and caricatures coming strangely close to a realistic representation how people experience their surroundings; some things are peripheral, others familiar, and still others are fascinatingly weird unknowns.

"There is no set way to deal with a question as broad and deep as identity and I don’t want to limit myself to any one way of painting. Sometimes figures are clearly defined, sometimes it’s ambiguous or the question simply evaporates. I’d like to tap into a universal human experience but know there’s no such thing; we all experience the world differently. When gender and race are eliminated, something else is left to see; other connections are made between the figures and their worlds."

Little Shaver, 2005

To Eisenman, her paintings are only pieces serving a larger community of artists who all contribute their unique views to humanity, views that she herself wishes to express but can't figure out how to paint. 

"The over abundance of disposable and meaningless images gives oil painting more value. It’s shocking to go to a museum now and be reminded of the power a painting can have after surfing the Internet all day... It’s the realization that you’re not just looking at a painting, say, by Van Gogh, but that one can actually commune with his spirit, just by looking, and time collapses."

Commerce Feeds Creativity, 2004

Eisenman's skill as a painter shows in her vivid colors, clean rendering and versatile style. But I find her ideas just as if not more inspiring than her punchy visuals. These are images that you want to decode and investigate for extra narrative details.

Ketchup & Mustard War, 2005