Giovanni Littlslr DionisiFull Bloom for Toh! Magazine (2015)

The delicate use of color in these is what initially commanded my attention. Each illustration features an ever so slightly different soft pastel background and the so subtle it’s almost pallid minimalism of the flowers focuses attention on the red to pink gradations evidencing vigorous stimulation.

As far the line work goes it always impresses me when someone can imply a great deal of detail with only the most minimal representation. And while I did immediately appreciate that here, there is definitely more to it.

Note: how the jaggedness of the lines which delineate the outer parameter of the essential form. (The hands in the second image approach a nearly cartoonish level of semiotic implication.) The less vigorous interior lines might, in another work, suggest vagary or something intended to be left open to the viewer imagination. But with these illustrations the unsubtle is the encaustic that enables mere implications to be more easily apprehended.

I read those gentler more seemingly ponderous interior lines as a statement on fragility/vulnerability. It’s a ballsy approach and I think it elevates the work substantially.

hassnaamohamed:

Extraordinary people are, ordinary people by Hassnaa

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Hossnaa Mohamed’s illustrations are not unlike look books from those trendy nationwide chains flinging promises of faux indie cred with their shitty threads.

Were this just another hit-and-run denunciation, it would perpetuate the same sort of hollow vapidity it means to critique.

There’s something altogether more heartfelt here, however: the so-cool-it-bleeds haute couture façade of sleek, clean lines remain but are instead imbued with self-conscious anxiety—the cool is beset by the awkwardness.

It’s staggeringly familiar: wanting to be wanted, one reach for some vaunted ideal of cool touted; while what precisely what makes one cool is the same thing insisting one isn’t.

Pointing out problems is one thing. Pursing the inversion of the present order is another. Neither effort accomplishes much of anything. To truly subvert requires the fundamental alteration of the conversation.

Ms. Mohamed’s work is not only subversive as fuck—it’s sexy as hell.