The art of Anthony Goicolea

Premature (2003).

It’s difficult to avoid the word “dreamlike” when looking at Anthony Goicolea‘s carefully-staged tableaux, all of which use the artist himself as their subject, redressed and multiplied by Photoshop into an army of clones. The artist-as-model isn’t a new thing—Cindy Sherman has been doing this for years—but the possibilities of digital manipulation still seem rather under-explored in the contemporary art world; whether that’s down to a lack of the necessary aptitude on the part of artists or simply avoidance of a medium more commonly associated with advertising and illustration is hard to say.

Poolpushers I (2001).

Goicolea certainly has the aptitude, many of these images have the same slightly hallucinatory quality as the photo-collages which Hipgnosis produced for album covers in the 1970s. When you add the inevitable narrative speculation which any staged photo generates—what exactly is happening in these pictures?—and a gay subtext which quite often becomes a very overt text, you have something very intriguing indeed.

Cannibals (2001).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jason Driskill
• Toxicboy