FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Artist Creates Hallucinatory Portraits In A Series Of Stunning Cinemagraphs

In a series of bizarre GIFs, Jon Jacobsen cranks the weirdness factor all the way up to eleven.

Human portraits filtered through the dreamscape are what Chilean artist Jon Jacobsen explores in a series of cinemagraphs called The Present. These haunting, distorted images feature a subject who, like the dreaming woman in Fuseli's The Nightmareis surrounded by his own unconscious leaking out in to the real world as the two combine into one freaky, phantasmagorical whole.

The figure in Jacobsen's GIFs takes up a pose that's caught between torment and trance, as the elastic imagery ripples into life around him, twisting the bodies further or complementing the fantastical goings-on taking place already. It's a mix of the visionary with the everyday, as still life objects rest in the shot—some innocuous like a bunch of flowers, others slightly more sinister.

Advertisement

On his Behance page Jacobsen gives a short explanation for the series: "Animated images inspired in the present and how we feel it with our senses." It's the kind of present you might feel hanging after the third day at a festival. Either way, Jacobsen's portraits recall the melting-in-the-sun surrealism of Dalí merged with the through-a-glass-darkly morbidity of Dutch still life. Check out the series below and head to Jacobsen's website for more of his hallucinatory imaginings.

h/t Laughing Squid

Related

Chilling Cinemagraphs Document The Chernobyl Aftermath

Artist Creates Alien-Inspired GIFs (And Leggings)

Turning Nick Cave's Heard NY Into GIFs