Pessoli (a modern day Francis Bacon) & Cake: "Fragile Portraits"

Before we get into the new Swoon-- CAKE ...

The Chelsea art galleries had their openings this past Thursday; it was a night of free wine, champagne, beer; drunkenly dodging taxis while crossing from 10th to 11th, between W. 19th and 27th. It was a good night, although I was unfortunately only able to hit up a few galleries on 19th and 20th (I didn't even get halfway through-- had to go to a floor meeting at 8pm.)

It was also Fashion Week, so running back across 6 avenues with suitemate Alex was difficult seeing as I stopped at nearly every department store along the way. They were giving away free cucumber/mint cocktails and gay men kept complimenting me on my neon-orange coat. How could I resist?

Among the 4 or 5 galleries we had time to squeeze in, two artists stood out the most. The first was Alessandro Pessoli, born in Cervia, Italy, whose large-scale oil paintings of deformed figures popped in brilliant, clashing colors and Francis-Bacon style nightmarish forms.

One enormous painting ( I love big canvases that overwhelm viewers with their voracious size) was of Jesus Christ on a cross, smudged, yellow, pink, looming, with a factory pipe sticking out from the cross. Hmm. Unfortunately I couldn't find the painting online to show you.

Here are some more examples of Pessoli's work:





The influences of Francis Bacon are apparent in Pessoli's work. Here are a few of Bacon's paintings.

Francis Bacon:









Man, this guy is just as ghoulish as his art.


Pessoli's creepy figure paintings are even reminiscent of yet another familiar figure painter...a woman this time. Enter Marlene Dumas:




Kinda cool how they're all linked and influenced by one another. Anyway, enough of this mad jumping around and time to zoom in on the feature: CAKE (no, not the band, you damn hipsters).


I haven't had the chance to make it out to Brooklyn too often in the past year, although I plan on heading out tomorrow to the PERFORM WILLIAMSBURG ( uh oh, hipster alert) arts and music fest with Taelor and possibly Yonad. Hopefully we'll be able to make it to the Brooklyn art museum as I haven't been there yet. I'm assuming most of Cake's pieces are located in Brooklyn, as are a lot of other street artists... the world of Brooklyn lies to be explored this year (I know Manhattan like the back of my hand--that's probably a lie, but it sounds cool, doesn't it?)

Brooklyn IS the home of street art at this point, perhaps next to London. Manhattan just doesn't have its shit together anymore.

And here we are with some Cake, another female street artist with killer skillz.


I admire her simple (yet cunningly disturbing) portraits, their graceful contours; these are like my contour drawings from freshman year of high school, except twisted and demented, colorful, more expressive.






...Is that a fist punching a baby?





all hand drawn carbon print & acrylic.

Aha! Now I remember!
I HAVE seen one of Cake's pieces in real life. I saw it painted on a wall at 112 Greene Street at a street art exhibit last year in SoHo:


^ And here is the masterpiece in process.