Michal Buddabar – Paula Lyily (2016)

Geez Louise, what are they putting in the water in Poland? The concentration of fucking fantastic image makers active there is just effing breath-taking.

Buddabar is putting out some interesting work. You can easily pinpoint specific influences. For example: if you take any artist featured multiple times by The Quiet Front, you’re going to find traces of those folks work in Buddabar’s.

I don’t want to belabor that point by cross-referencing specific examples but I do think the it’s useful to compare and contrast with Alexander Bergström.

There’s a huge degree of overlap between their two respective bodies of work: an unapologetic voyeurism, similar form and tone, etc. Bergström‘s use of color is superior, further I think he’s arguably the better technician.

However, where Bergström seemingly tries to sublimate his more perverse (I’m employing my preferred value-neutral connotation w/r/t this term), Buddabar is more unflinching–also, although this perhaps wasn’t the case two years ago, he seems to be a much better editor than Bergström.

But what I also love about this image is it’s yet another wonderful example of how using the frame lines to crop out someone’s face in service of preserving anonymity is just a garbage decision. There are so many other ways to go about it and even the worst, most ill-advised face blocking device will be infinitely better than figurative decapitation.

Either way, definitely check out Buddabar’s work–it’s pretty great, especially the more recent stuff.