Synesthesia Garden
< a weird art + style blog >

Dear readers and connoisseurs of the bizarrely beautiful, welcome to   SYNESTHESIA GARDEN.
Here you will find paeans to all varieties of dark, surreal, odd, and provocative contemporary art, style, and creativity.

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  • Marco Mazzoni’s “River of Milk”

    10.23.12

    Marco Mazzoni‘s new show, River of Milk, is currently exhibiting at Roq La Rue. Bright, startlingly vivid, and poetic, these vibrantly colored pieces are dreamlike and evoke a sense of poignancy, such as the almost stunning emotion and visual impact given off by the vision of the crow-wreathed face in Medusa (below). See the entire show here.

    Last but not least, not included in the show, this is an image posted on Marco Mazzoni’s Tumblr page of a stunningly gorgeous triptych entitled The Songwriters (click for larger image):

    Tags: art shows, birds, butterflies, colorful, emotive, fauna, flora, flowers, flowers in hair, hauntingly beautiful, nature, realism, saturated color, surreal, swan

    No Comments »  

  • Deconstruction: The Art of Cane Dojcilovic

    09.11.12

    See more after the cut

    Tags: black and white, exposed anatomy, hauntingly beautiful, melancholy, prose poetry, realism, realistic drawings, surreal

    No Comments »  

  • Thomas Devaux

    08.20.12

    See more after the cut

    Tags: (twists on) traditional art, black and white, black-and-white portraits, eerie, hauntingly beautiful, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, religious imagery, surreal

    No Comments »  

  • Olivier de Sagazan

    03.11.12

    See more after the cut

    Tags: blood, bodily art, body art, body painting, creepy, dark, distorted bodies, eerie, emotive, evisceration, expressive, flour-white flesh, grotesque, hyperreal, insanity, macabre, psychological horror, realism, red, red and white, surreal, textured, tortured bodies, unnaturally colored flesh, visceral, wound

    5 Comments »  

  • Dennis Cooper + Gisèle Vienne

    03.06.12

    These eerie, alluring, adolescent life-size dolls were created for the theater/performance pieces collaborated on by writer Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne since 2004. As Cooper says, “We consider the dolls to be actors in our works almost on a par with the human performers, and, although the dolls aren’t credited individually in the works, they each have names and fictional biographies constructed by Gisele. These biographies are used to determine which roles might be suited to their ‘personalities’. Some of the dolls have been featured in multiple works, and several have played both male and female roles.”

    See more after the cut

    Tags: bizarre, blood, dolls, eerie, expressive, innocence/menace, life-sized, lolita-esque, performance art, sinister arts and crafts, surreal, symbolism, theater, trauma, uncanny, white

    1 Comment »  

  • Tim Lewis’ “Pony”

    02.18.12

    Tim Lewis‘ Pony is a bizarre and uncanny kinetic sculpture that was exhibited at 2009′s Kinetica Art Fair. Unsettling and uber-realistic, Pony looks somewhat like a surreal ostrich-esque creature composed of human arms, pulling a small one-seater carriage behind itself; motion-sensitive, and appearing to “walk” in a very eerie and delicately articulated fashion, it is another creepy and brilliant intersection of art and science, and a provoking piece of interactive sculpture. Its title also suggests a veiled commentary on the relationship between humans and animals.

    Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.

    Tags: articulate hands, biological/organic/alien, bizarre, conceptual, creature, eerie, human/machine hybrids, installation art, kinetic sculptures, life-sized, realism, robots, sculptures, surreal, weird sculptures

    3 Comments »  

  • Hell House: The Art of Esao Andrews

    01.23.12

    Esao Andrews combines a colorful palette with a Gothic sensibility. Some of his paintings are twists on traditional portraits from earlier epochs akin to the work of Nicola Samorì. Wildly dilapidated and foreboding houses are a recurring motif, and, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson‘s psychological horror stories, depict the inner, psychical falling apart, decay, distortion, and warping. Fairy tales and folklore, including Pinocchio and Thumbelina, loom in the forefront with menacing or perverted appeal. In some works, his vibrant style illustrates the bizarre, the obscene, and aberrations, contrasting atrocious or monstrous things such as a giant, bloated black spider with a symbol of sweetness, purity, and elevation such as a child or an angel. Some of his illustrations are cartoonish, charmingly retro, with a dark, whimsical sense of humor, while others are realistically rendered and Dali-esque, while yet others are macabre and lovelorn, bloody tale-telling depictions.

    See more after the cut

    Tags: (twists on) traditional art, dark, illustrations, innocence/menace, macabre, modern fairy tales, monsteresque, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, portraits, realism, religious imagery, spiders, surreal, symbolism, victorian

    No Comments »  

  • Jeremy Enecio

    12.23.11

    >>Jeremy Enecio<<

    Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alien beauty, animals, creature, hauntingly beautiful, illustrations, mythology, realism, sexuality, surreal

    No Comments »  

  • Film Review: The Reflecting Skin

    12.18.11

    1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.

    Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.

    The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.

    This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.

    The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.

    Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy

    No Comments »  

  • Akino Kondoh

    11.01.11

    {Akino Kondoh‘s sketches and drawings for her short animations}

    Beautiful.

    Tags: black and white, bugs, children, creepy, innocence, intricate line drawings, ladybug, nostalgia, red, surreal, sweet/melancholy, trauma, twins/doppelgangers/doubles

    No Comments »  

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“Creativity is the only relative freedom we have in this world.”  — Vania Zouravliov