"Beauty is a switching point..."

Marilyn Minter - Green Pink Caviar

The trailer for Marilyn Minter's video Green Pink Caviar.
http://www.greenpinkcaviar.com/

"I was shooting stills of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass. I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of painting with my tongue. My makeup artist shot some short videos just to see how it would look. The low definition videos looked so good that later we made plans to do a professional high definition video. I have made both billboards and produced a commercial advertising a 1989 painting show so this made sense as a next step. Green Pink Caviar seems to have a life of its own."

Marilyn Minter

'The video was inspired by a photo shoot where Minter directed her models to lick brightly colored candies while she shot photos from underneath a glass plate. The models' tongues mixed the colorful sugar with saliva, slurping and pushing color across the glass surface to simulate painting. Driven by her fascination with the body, Green Pink Caviar sets the stage for chance to happen.'

Lovestoned

Laurent Champoussin

As seen on Acidolatte

Marilyn Minter - "Eventually everybody's make-up runs"

Marilyn Minter video portrait from KOVAROVA on Vimeo.

Painted Lady

Artist Kimiko Yoshida  has been transforming herself into various representations of herself and others in several series of self portraits (painting herself and then photographing it) since she began her career. She has turned herself into famous painters, brides from all over the world, blown glass letters and symbols and much much more. In fact she has created over 330 different self-portraits in the last decade.  While much of her work engages the viewer, it is her cosmetic application and consideration of colour line and tonality that reveals an incredible skill and a clear knowledge of the impact of cosmetic artifice.

Writing (Marrakech Henna).  Self Portrait. 2009

Writing (Tuareg Henna).  Self Portrait, 2009

Writing (Meknes Arabesque).  Self Portrait,  2009

Writing (Essaouiri Henna).  Self Portrait, 2009

Faking it

Giovanni Bortolani had been working in world of advertising for a while, a world where every picture must be processed in order to erase any little imperfection, where everything is glossy and unreal.  This concentration has given him the ability to focus on the human obsession with always appearing perfect, remaining forever young, the desire to construct a body with almost no flesh on it.  The subject of his work is the body, the frailty of appearance and the scars life generates.  Contradicting the myth of eternal beauty that survives the fight against time, the photographs for the FAKE TOO FAKE project debunk such conception and unveil the human fear behind the race.  

In discussing the aesthetic research behind his work he refers to the phrase "so beautiful it looks real" as a method of indicating a perfect artifact while manipulating the tiniest detail, and refuses to admire beauty for the sake of it.  His collaboration with hair and make-up artist Marcorea Malia  has transformed the appearance of the sitters into a cruel reality as evidence of this aesthetic concern.  As Malia works on the body, shapes the hair and paints the skin, suddenly a fig becomes an open wound on the chest, and boiled shrimps looks like entrails coming out of the body.  Later Bortolani manipulates the image so that the arm of one becomes someone else and infected scars look like a doodle.  Bortolani expresses this collaboration as catching ideas floating in the air to make them 'visible'.   To him, aesthetic is content.

 

s

Marking out established territories

 Francisco Ben?tez

As seen on Behance.net.