What If Pop Culture Icons Were Cubist Masterpieces?
Freddy Mercury, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Elvis, Groucho Marx, Bruce Lee, and even Picasso himself, get geometric mugshots in illustrator Federico Babina's latest series.
If Picasso had gotten around to painting Andy Warhol or Bruce Lee, it might have looked something like illustrator Federico Babina's new set of minimalist portraits, Inkonic Faces. With a pun game that's always on-point, Babina's previous projects often fuse architecture with various other artforms (Archiset = film sets, Artistect = painting, and Archizoo = animals). Inkonic Faces takes the same pop culture remixing premise but moves away from architecture, as Babina wants to focus in on his skills as an illustrator.
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"The project is part of a study on the simplification and the identification of the basic elements for the recognition of a portrait," Babina explains to The Creators Project. "My references, conscious and unconscious, are many. I like to take things, decompose them like a puzzle, and reconstruct them in a different form." With jagged lines and formal deconstruction reminiscent of Picasso's less-chaotic paintings, the portraits preserve the mood and personality of each subject, while remaining visually similar. "The idea is to achive an almost abstract representation without losing the essence of the figurative representation."Inkonic Faces is a monthlong work-in-progress that will continue to unfold over the next 15 days on Babina's Facebook page. Check out a few of our favorites, ranging from Audrey Hepburn to Freddy Mercury, below.
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