[NSFW] Sex and Violence Reproduced in Detail with a Ballpoint Pen

This article contains adult content.

One can’t help but become bewitched by the strikingly vivid images of scantily clad women in Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas. (HE)ARTBROKEN, his solo exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery, reimagines large-scale photographs he’s taken as hyperrealistic ballpoint pen and marker drawings. Casas meticulously goes over large prints of his photos with a ink pen or colored markers, turning them into hyperrealistic and illustrative compositions.

The scenes Casas captures represent what is described as a memorialization of the artist’s “personal and provocative exploits.” His pictures are meant to explore the beauty of broken relationships from an autobiographical perspective, one that reflects on the way love can affect art. The artist describes the show as “a sentimental examination of the past in which I mix old and new imagery, similar to the act of remembering.”

Included in Casas' exhibition is a series of drawings entitled, Life is a Dirty Glitch, in which the artist tries to represent the “unconscious deterioration of memories” through glitched-out imagery. Sexually explicit photographs are distorted and blurred by oversaturated pixels that conceal the subject's identity.

(HE)ARTBROKEN is the final installment in a trilogy of shows Casas started earlier this year. The first show, SPQR(CA)VITA, opened at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, and was then followed by O(H)ROMAO(H)MORTE at Galería Fernando Pradilla in Madrid. Check out more of Casas' works below:

See more work by Juan Francisco Casas on his website. For information about the (HE)ARTBROKEN exhibition, click here.

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