Horrifying and alluring, a scene of monstrous grins that are both haunting and inviting. Depending on the context, were I to stumble upon these electric grimaces in the street or in a bar, I would either flee or fall in line, perhaps hoping to absorb some of the epic coolness that can only be found nearer the morning side of midnight.
The portraits of German painter and digital artist marubu imply the non-exclusive extremes of depravity and the upper heights of pure grownup fun, reminding me of the formative experience of drinking in the mysterious music video lifestyles seen in movies like Hackers, Velvet Goldmine, or Trainspotting.
Marubu achieves this not through representation — most of his work is close-up single-subject portraits with no other objects in view — but through the mere expressiveness of digital line and color.
The theatrical eccentricity of marubu’s work — from the portraits to the tableaux and on to the poster-like collages — call to mind a melange of imprecise comparisons. As with any master thief worth the appellation, marubu’s style evades accusation while flaunting and flouting the debt he would owe if he were ever caught.
marubu’s Portraits
The first and most obvious comparison marubu’s work calls to mind might be Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose reckless approach to facial features itself implied a hint of Picasso, if not the African masks that Picasso was cribbing from.
But marubu is not half as reckless as Basquiat; marubu wants you to see a person (or at least a personality, an attitude, a posture) under the style, whereas Basquiat used faces as any other symbol in his thought-collage oeuvre. Picasso, on the other hand, often flattened his more abstracted portraits to a cool, unemotional surface; with these, I find myself connecting more with the artistry than the subject.
marubu’s Tableaux
Since the neon-soaked epileptic seizures that characterized his early digital work, marubu has zoomed out from the close-ups to create larger-scale scenes that call to mind his erstwhile countrymen: German expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix.
As in Kirchner, the wider angle affords marubu the room to create a world that is at once recognizable and immersively all his own. By removing the self-indulgent comforts of the endless detail that a close-up allows, the artist is asked to think at a higher level, not in the moment but in the movement of those portrayed. Where the faces are frozen in time, the scenes imply the lives lived the moment before and the moment after, if not further out both directions in the timeline.
Marubu’s tableaux have evolved too, from stylized scenes that might be filtered realism to something much looser in its subject matter, unmoored from showing likely characters (Iike the giant leering face in The Collector). In this progression, he starts to look more like pop artist Richard Hamilton.
Street, Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
marubu’s Collages
It’s with marubu’s more recent explorations — work that recalls haunted magazine pages — that show the artist breaking with easy comparison through a combination of his well-developed signature style, collage, text, and the mangled corpse of what might have been comic book panels.
Perhaps the closest (but still quite distant) comparison ready for describing this new era of marubu’s work would be the large-scale collage painting of James Rosenquist, but the comparison feels like a stretch.
As one of the most exciting and yet relatively overlooked artists working in web3 today, marubu seems to be on an evolutionary path with an unmistakable touch. Even as I finish this draft, thinking I’ve covered the three major styles of an artist at work, I stumble upon a new piece, unlike anything else he’s done, and yet as absolutely marubu as any of his work.
To learn more about marubu, read our interview with the artist here and visit his MakersPlace profile.
