Stumbled upon in searching for something totally different: the Madrid street artist Ze Carrión and his depictions of sex between superheroes, starting with one of the slash standards, Superman and Batman (SuperBat, for short):
(#1)
(Love the facial expressions.)
This was the spray painting that came to me first. Then I found a twofer, SuperWonder (Superman and Wonder Woman) and BatRobin (Batman and Robin):
(#2)
(Street art comes with rough, dirty, complex surfaces and, frequently, intrusions of other material into or around the art itself. Part of its attraction is the skill it takes to work around these complications and the enthusiasm with which the artist absorbs and incorporates them.)
It’s hard to find much information about Carrión (the Ze is apparently short for César; the Carrión I don’t know about), but from a 6/16/15 interview on the Amsterdam Street Art site, “Finding Ze Carrión” by Anastasio Santana Fernandez:
ASF: What are your artistic influences or source of inspiration?
ZC: Everything: emotions, feelings, Internet, television, comics. I’m interested in Google idea of general knowledge. I like the idea of Wikipedia, a global knowledge, it’s a god-like entity. All information we get today come from these sources. My ideas come from these sources. From an artistic point of view, classic masters, like Velázquez, Goya, Vermeer; but also modern ones like Warhol or Duchamp. At the same time, I´ve got much influence from Land-Art artists; the theme of beauty, the lightness of being… [and he started as a street tagger, then got serious about art as a vocation]
ASF: What´s your education background?
ZC: I´ve got a Fine Arts Degree. I studied in Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Then, when you finished, you have to face the world, the real world, and then… what? You are a bit lost. You don’t know what to do. This brought a crisis to your life, you don’t know what to paint, I don’t know what to tell or express through your work. One day, I decided to tell what is censored, what they don’t want us to see, the hidden part of life and society.
Much of his work is playful, like the superhero paitings above. Or his version of Snow White:
(#3)
In which the poisoned apple comes on a smartphone (presumably from Apple).
Or this elaborate composition, “The Girl and the Pearl – Anamorphosis” by Alto and Ze Carrión:
(#4)
Which combines a take on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring —
(#5)
with a pun on pearl / purl (as in knitting) and a reference to anamorphosis. From NOAD2:
noun anamorphosis: a distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.
The other major vein in Carrión’s work seems to be the grotesque, as in long series of portraits of serial killers from around the world.
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