If graphic artist and author Chris Ware of Jimmy Corrigan fame went on safari with Pablo Picasso, their souvenirs might look like the recent works of illustrator and typographic artist Ben Newman featured in the show, “Masks,” now open at the Nobrow Gallery in London.  Since the turn of the twentieth century, the cultural idiom of modernity owes a debt to primitive visages: Picasso’s use of African mask motifs, as seen in the seminal painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), heralded his Cubist period and, ultimately, a revolution in Western art history.

Newman’s evocation of primitivism, however, is also layered with a retroactive sense of futuristic fascination.  Weird, wily faces are composed with a repetitive mechanical energy reminiscent of Italian Futurism, the graphic rigor of Russian Constructivism and the clunky horror of nineteen-fifties American science-fiction monsters in a faded pulp comic palette.  Symmetry offers no solace in these images, at once remarkable reminders of the highly organized aesthetics of the uncivilized and machined abstractions of ritualistic horror.

Click here to discover more about Ben Newman’s work and purchase a print from the Masks series.

JVM