Respect Authority

Ronald Kurniawan may have just become my new favorite artist. Of course, in two weeks he’ll have to fight to the death before a savage, jeering crowd for his right to hold his title against whatever fit of fancy crosses my path next, but for now, he can paint comfortably and continue taking massive doses of LSD on the weekends or whatever it is that drives his delightful blend of genius and insanity.

Kurniawan’s style is uniquely beautiful; something about it seems utterly alien, but most of his paintings still maintain a very welcoming atmosphere. His work is incredibly psychedelic without being overwhelming or falling into the common problem of being deemed suitable only for fuzzy velvet blacklight posters relegated to the dusty back corners of random suburban head shops.

Rather, he takes his wild and colorful surrealism and mixes it with playful typography and ample wit to keep it from becoming too “dude I ate a bunch of acid and ecstasy when I was backpacking through Europe and seriously dude, it really changed my perspective on a whole ton of shit.” His incredible illustrations are still plenty mindblowing, but without the disconcerting head fuck and remain accessible enough for a broader pop culture audience. Basically, his illustrations are the embodiment of the perfect party drug.

It’s a little bit Dali-with-Photoshop, and a little bit uniquely bizarre — however, Kurniawan’s strangeness largely stays on the light side. The term “eye candy” has never been more appropriate — without a sense of menace or any looming dark undertones in the background of his tripped-out flowers bouncing on a see-saw portraits, the viewer is free to soak up the radioactive colors and enjoy all the truly outlandish details without feeling like they’ve been violated somehow, as if they’ve been made witness to something abstractly but deeply disturbing that really should have been kept private. Sorry, but when I’m looking at art, I just don’t really like to feel like I’ve just learned about how many children my neighbor of 15 years has raped in secret.

Indeed, these are not images plucked from the deranged mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, they are captures from a sunny otherworldly dimension, where one can consume all the hallucinogenic compounds they want without ending up like that kid in highschool who couldn’t stop blinking.