The world of Mark Rennie’s art is a bleak and cold one, like the damp chill of a Scottish mist in the shadow of towering, craggy mountains. His art evokes an understanding of what it means to be uprooted from history, colonized and cannibalized by an invading worldview, burned and decapitated from the earth. His subjects are faceless, dark pits look out from underneath hoods and bonnets, or they are swathed in dirty rags. There is a sense of depressing reality about his work – the priests and peasants, executioners and thieves, the belching smokestacks coating his landscapes in corrosion. Rennie’s darkness hits at the soul of humanity’s ills, the authoritarian takeover of culture and the slavery of the ruled, human, animal and plant. The evils are all captured in the heavy blackness of his atmosphere, and are almost more terrifying than the monsters and gore that characterize a lot of dark artwork. After the jump, wander the bleak moor, and check out a selection of pieces by Mark Rennie.
New Comments