Ophelia
Francesco Albano is a skin artist, also Italian, though he lives in Turkey. He’s been creating such a stir of late that Huffington Post has anointed him. Click on the images or his name to see more. They are icky, horrible, funny — discomfort makes you want to tell jokes. Surprising, because, of course, you’re used to the skin with bones and flesh inside. Here we have boneless skin or partial bodies or skin and fat but no bones or just skin and bones (no flesh). All this is obvious. What is less obvious and more beautiful is the sag of gravity, the lush heaviness of the unsupported skin, or the fat folds, or the bulging density of knees, the tension between what should be there and isn’t, between up and down (or between standing up and being strung up). Skin also the seems simultaneously both a puddle and a rock, marble. The artist mixes classical techniques with conceptual headstands. The effect is amazingly energetic, startling. My first thought: Francis Bacon meets the bug in Men in Black (putting on his human skin suit) — yes, I had to make joke, but I am restraining myself.
dg
The Age of Games Has Gone
On the Eve