Brooklyn Artist John De La O

John De La O is a contemporary Brooklyn artist. His work represents an up and coming new presence in New York based contemporary art. His paintings are eye grabbing, thought provoking, and often haunting pop art based images that take the viewer to a place where the barrage of media and popular imagery to which we are exposed on a daily basis blends into the inner world with its dreamlike incongruities. John De La O art uses comic book characters, cartoon images, film noir references, and similar elements as the imaginal raw material of a collage like visual field.

Johns Website

A visit to Johns website is a great way to familiarize yourself with his art as well as to purchase his paintings. The site has samples of his work, a video showing a recent exhibition at the Rogue Space in Chelsea, a bio page, press, news, and contact information. Clicking the paintings tab at the top calls up a list of categories of groups of works by the artist. Some notable painting groups of Johns include:

Film Noir

These modern art works are done on generally 24 inch x 24 inch canvases and use imagery from still frames of film noir movies as well as movie posters. The paintings use heightened color and energetic depiction to create a sense of action and motion and at the same time depth of imaginative focus. The grand tradition of New York as a center for theater and film (as well as the scene of many movies over the years) makes film noir an especially relevant theme for a New York artist.

Large Paintings

These large paintings are meant to take up a significant portion of a wall and to overwhelm the senses to some degree. They are on canvases that are 7 feet by 3 feet. They exemplify the classic John De La O technique of creating surreal juxtapositions out of the familiar pop culture art and cartoon forms and personalities. The colors used in these paintings have a sense of subtlety that brings the known and accessible quality of the imagery into a different sort of focus.

Girl Pictures

John delves a bit into the erotic as it meets the popular with his Girl Pictures series. These are nudes that, while not overly explicit, nevertheless give the viewer a sense of sexuality both in a simple sense and as seen through the lense of various artistic and entertainment based visual media. These are colorful line drawings of seductive women with various decorative backgrounds, comic book characters, and other design elements entering the visual frame to create an eclecticism and deeper sense of understanding. They are erotic in feeling tone while at the same time making evident Johns keen eye for juxtapositions that express his esthetic and cultural observations.

Collage Series

The collage series makes a bolder use of color than some of the above series. It collages the pop art type elements into complex conglomerates of highly charged imagery. These paintings have the effect of grabbing the viewers attention with a barrage of familiar and unfamiliar thematic content that raises questions about culture, sexuality, morality, entertainment media, and the role of the viewer, and society at large.

Brooklyn Pictures

These black and white ink drawings deal with themes closer to home. Namely Johns home in Brooklyn, New York. These drawings depict not comic book characters or film noir heroes and heroines, but rather ordinary Brooklynites on the street. It is almost as though in this series John is seeking to create a contrast with between the flashy and disorienting worlds of his other works and the more organic and immediate feel of his day to day surroundings.