Distorx

Black Mirror

The author is dead

Replicant Memories

Unavoidable Pollution

Vortex Life

Agua Negra

One reason I started collecting and archiving art is because I realized events like Art Basel are just not good enough when it comes to showcasing modern contemporary art. Actually, you’d be far better off looking through sites like Behance or DeviantArt to find the art that speaks to you than relying on the so-called “tastemakers”.

During my aesthetic “awakening”, Alexis Ciler was one of my first discoveries. He made me realize that the art style I was documenting was actually international in scope.

Hailing from Mexico City, Ciler describes himself as the artist who “smells death”. As Glenn Astete-Ortega writes, Ciler is “very interested in the codes of advertising and pop culture and how these are communicated to the masses from the forties and fifties to the present.” Simply put, Ciler’s art is an exercise in culture jamming, and thus uses the tools of modern communication to relay messages of death, degradation, and evil.

Ciler is also not afraid to engage in a little abstraction. One aspect of Sizz art that fascinates me is how notions of realism and modern life can bleed into something verbally inexpressible and can only be conveyed through the power of the image. What makes abstraction such a valuable tool these images can become characters, much like the alphabet or numerals.

This necro art blatantly touches upon the three nexus of Sizz: expressionism, noir, and are-bureh-bokeh. It’s an indication that while the aesthetic is rarely reported upon, it’s a burgeoning global trend.