If There Is An Artist - 1389 Words

If there is an artist, who can challenge the coexistence of beauty and ugliness, it’s Bart Hess. Hess is not only a believer of the beauty in ugly, he pushes his fascination for the human body constantly, exploring and manipulating textile design, to create tactile textures and surfaces within material which blur the boundary between human and new species. His work becomes a questionable object of perception. During his graduation project at Eindhoven Design Academy, Hess worked on a series of fake furs, made out of metals, silicone and plastics. The idea of the soft, fluffy, tactile quality of fur being lost, transcending when coming into contact, it becomes a cold, sharp, dangerous object. Row upon Row of endless needles inserted into†¦show more content†¦Then photographing their bodies using the most peculiar of materials, they created fascinating and simultaneously repugnant images of Globules of Foam engulfing the body, asymmetric spines, bulged oversized muscled forms. What becomes more apparent within the photographs, the disturbing blank expressions, the non-existent emotional state of the subject, just starring back at you. It is not horrified or excited about the change of their form, they are merely present and allow themselves to be shown to you. It’s a purely visceral and visually arresting experience, that sort of lucid acceptance, clearly not hiding the kind of imperfections and oddities that society mostly trains us to be ashamed of. They are unnervingly confident about themselves. Lucy and Bart’s photographs, no matter how unnerving they might be, present us with a strong character, something to possibly compare with the likes of Picasso and Da Vinci’s painted subjects. The rest is up to the viewer. There’s something so primal and immediate about seeing human bodies mutated. It calls into questions all of our ideals about beauty and they way we judge people based on their surfaces. This odd sort of artistic mingling – where the colours are beautiful, but the shapes are grotesque – is really jarring. Or maybe it’s the way they seem to know something about their aberrations that we don’t. Like we’ve yet to have any idea the kind of powers that lie inside their new bodies and hands and faces, and as long