An Italian artist named Kuinexs has created a photo series that uses Terry Richardson's photography in unique and slightly disturbing ways. The series, titled "Photodissolutions" consists of Richardson's photos of mostly nude women that have been liquefied with solvents and swirled around in a process that the artist describes as "painting backwards." The resulting images resemble the portraits of figurative painter Francis Bacon, both in style and composition.
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Kuinexs explains in an email to The Huffington Post that the title of the series comes from his artistic process. His work with solvents is meant to represent the "liquidation of formal identity."
He also writes that Richardson and Bacon have more in common than you might think. "First of all, figure is pivotal, and all the tension is concentrated on the subject," Kuinexs told The Huffington Post. "Most of Terry’s figures, like Bacon’s, have a central position in compositions and stand against a uniform unadorned background, wall, or empty hotel room. Eroticism is central for Richardson like it was crucial in Francis Bacon’s; many of Bacon’s subjects and models were his lovers and very close friends, he frequently painted male couples having sexual intercourse."
Kuinexs adds that both men share a narcissistic quality: "Terry is obsessed with his own image like Bacon was, painting his self-portraits over and over again through his life. The realism, the odd and isolated figures, bodies in unlikely poses, etc, [Terry's] got nothing more left to learn from Bacon."
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A fan of Richardson's work, Kuinexs comes to the photographer's defense and equates his recent troubles to those of other "innovative" artists: "I think there has always been such controversies with great artists. This makes me think of Schiele, Bacon himself, Mapplethorpe, [who] have been sexually very provocative in their art and Terry is among them."
To see more of the "Photodissolutions" series (some NSFW), head to Kuinexs' Tumblr.
[via HuffingtonPost]
