Today, I am writing about a contemporary painter that I discovered a year ago. And I say painter because she doesn’t like to be called artist: “I’m not calling myself artist, I’m a painter”. Her name is Oh de Laval, she’s half polish, half thai and she is based in London. I had stumbled upon her Instagram account and immediately became infatuated with her work. I was absolutely fascinated and captured by the vivid and life filled moments she was representing. Her paintings are pure, rough expression of emotions, sarcasm and sexuality. There is no lines, mostly just colors, all intense and dense. Still, all her paintings maintain a dreamy-like atmosphere that reminds French new wave cinema and dramatic theatricality. In fact, the compositions seem to be extrapolated from a play.
Her erotic, grotesque and provocative subjects include drunk priests, intertwined bodies in sexual positions, decapitated lovers, demons and dark sides of human beings. The titles of her paintings are often wordplays or clear provocations towards a social/cultural expectations and the viewer. The result is that violence, sex, love, sadism, sarcasm and colors mix into her works, leaving in an impact -whether it’s positive or negative- for the viewer. Sure thing is that she does not go unnoticed.
As she says “don’t give a shit about perspective”, and I couldn ’t agree more because the lack of boundaries and rules is exactly what makes her paintings explode of life and reality.
I do not want to over-describe her painting style, since her work is self-explanatory and can speak for itself. Moreover, in her self-professed manifesto, she states that “you should explore old artists’ way of living rather than studying their way of painting”. Therefore, here are some of her pieces I think many of you might love.
