Tornadoes, giant chickens and dead octopuses: a surreal painting by John Brosio

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

American artist John Brosio appreciates good French wine, but he will also be happy with the Budweiser can. He paints Texas whirlwinds and giant chickens with the self-confidence and delicacy of Camille Corot. In a word, Brosio is one of those artists whose works can simultaneously evoke nightmarish fantasies and a fit of laughter.

“I don’t think painting and life are one and the same, but in a sense, the paintings that I like reflect life and show it to me even more clearly, like any art that touches me,” says Brosio …

The first direction of art that John became seriously interested in was cinema, and this easily explains his love for movement, fantasy and the curiosities of nature, which he transfers to his canvases. The images he creates, inspired by nature or born of the imagination, are reminiscent of the special effects that appear in the cinema instead of the green screen. Bosio's favorite plot move is when something completely unthinkable or alarming (usually related to the natural world) happens in the background (or general) plane of the picture, but people, absorbed in their one-story reality, either do not notice the threat, or simply do not consider necessary to pay attention.

Despite some eccentricity and a certain amount of black humor, Bosio can be called a romantic in the sense that his paintings are imbued with admiration and reverence for the forces of nature. No wonder his favorite heroes are tornadoes, storms and tornadoes. As befits romanticism, nature in Bosio's canvases expresses human emotions, and much more passionately than people themselves.

Not alien to the artist and the method of metaphor. For example, in Fatigue, a man in an office suit returns home after a day of work at dusk, and his feeling of exhaustion materializes in the form of a giant wet octopus that clung to half of the house.

In State of the Union, three gigantic chickens rise above a small town whose inhabitants appear to be blissfully unaware. Bozio explains: “Greedy, pouty idiots rule a lot today, and this particular image is a powerful metaphor for what is happening. Is this a funny picture? May be. But this is rather a side effect of the gap between everyday life and problems that will never become part of it. Rather evil sarcasm."

If you replace the American province with a Swedish village, and chickens and octopuses with intelligent robots, you get the futuristic landscapes of Simon Stolenhag.