Enter a world of technicolor madness, with patterns assaulting your eyes in blinding color and images tearing at your retinas with whirling movement. This is the universe of Claudio Parentela, painter, illustrator, collagist and artist of all trades. His pieces are a humorous take on pop culture and mass mythology, combining collage and paint to create beautiful hideous creatures. Standards of female beauty are central to much of his work, but he depicts it as grotesque and ridiculous, with arms and legs askew, lips blubbering, doe eyes bleeding. I enjoy how he reworks models into monsters and objectifies Hitler with massive breasts and hairy legs -you don’t realize how suggestive his gaze is until it is perched on a weirdly sexy body. This artwork reminds me of John berger’s Ways of Seeing, in that Parentela has turned the objective gaze of patriarchy on its head, revealing the jumble of contradictions behind its simple dichotomies. After the jump, prepare to have your rods and cones blown away by Claudio Parentela.
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