Guido Mocafico

Nature morte aux poissons (from the series Natures mortes de table), 57x64 cm, 2004

Nature Morte à la Grenade  (from the series Natures mortes de table), 62x50 cm, 2005

Omnia Vanitas (from the series Vanites), 56x43.5 cm, 2007

Lampropeltis pyromelana (from the series Serpens), 2003

I'm sure some of you have noticed some of Guido Mocafico's amazing photographs of boxed snakes floating around lately on the internet.  They're certainly not new, and I'm not sure from whence this sudden surge in popularity came from after nine years (the Serpens series was completed in 2003), but I do think they're wonderful.  I'd like to think I could show these to some of the ophidiophobic people in my life and change their minds forever, but I'm not sure it would work out that way (You'd keep this as a pet -- you'd even wear it around your neck, wouldn't you?  No?  Not even with the right outfit?).

But the snakes aren't the point here.  They're stunning, but it's the banquet and animal still life pieces that really get me.  What's uncanny about them is how easy it is to forget what you're looking at.  They're photographs, but they just look like really good still life paintings done in the style of 17th century Flemish masters like Willem van Aelst and Willem Claeszoon Heda.  It's an impressive inversion of the usual "Oh my God, it looks like a photograph!" reaction to photorealistic drawings and paintings.  I realize that some might dismiss this as technically less impressive than a painting that looks like the real thing, but having attempted to light and photograph a few of my own sculptures, I can assure you that this isn't the case.

Guido Mocafico lives and works in Paris, was born in Switzerland, and is of Italian descent.  Bam!  I just covered three countries.  But I'm going to count him as a Swiss artist for my own purposes.  You can view more of his work at his website, guidomocafico.com 

Aleksandra Waliszewska

Untitled, 2011

Untitled, 2012

Balustrada, 2012

Untitled, 2012

Aleksandra Waliszewska is a Polish artist living and working in Warsaw.  I found out about her work via this post on Monster Brains three years ago, and I've thought about her work about once a week ever since then.  Her works in gouache (on paper, I believe) are stylistically rough -- pencil marks and slivers of white show through the paint.  This seems utterly appropriate, though, as I imagine her waking up from the middle of a dream and jotting the scene down on paper before all of its subtleties and weird atmospheric details escape her, then perhaps getting back under the covers and waiting to complete another sleep cycle so she can get up and do it all over again (she claims to produce about two of these per day).  That's all conjecture on my part, but these do look like the sorts of things that can only be accessed by dreaming and subconscious thought, don't they?  Things that show up often in Waliszewska's paintings include friendly goats, bleeding girls, flesh-eating monsters, faces melting and broken out in boils, and massive cats and spiders that appear to be up to no good.  I'll let you decide for yourself whether her works are disturbing, but it's hard to deny they're intriguing at the very least.

Aleksandra keeps a Blog, a Flickr, and a Tumblr, but I recommend visiting her Tumblr account here as she seems to update it more frequently than the others.