Channeling Francis Bacon, Artist Paints Over the Graphic Images of Terry Richardson’s ‘Terryworld’

For Photodissolutions, self-taught artist Kuinexs marries the photographic with the painterly, chemically altering images found in Terry Richardson’s monograph Terryworld, published by TASCHEN. After applying paint solvents to break down the surface of photographs, he uses the dissolved pigment as paint, distorting the human body in seductive ways. Inspired by the legendary Francis Bacon, he transforms the figures of Richardson’s photographs into fleshy deconstructions. Mysteriously blurred and decomposed, the nudes appear all the more elicit and alluring.

Approaching these taboo, observably pornographic images with his signature method, Kuinexs is able to imbue the sexual with an enigmatic sense of anxiety and fear. As the body dissolves into thick brushstrokes of red and black, the individual self is annihilated in service of a strange and sadomasochistic fusion with the other – both the lover and the observer. Disrupting the photographic elements of which it is composed, the figure bleeds wildly out of the frame and into its’ clean white boarders. Here, the object of our desires is a mutilated form both grotesque and alluring, a monster that mirrors our own unnamable guilt and yearning.

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