Nu-Brutalism
My work explores my search for spirituality in a secular culture - previously through music subcultures, fetish culture, or neopaganism - with a recent focus on the relationship between violence and ancient religion, human suffering and spirituality. I am inspired by Medieval and Baroque Catholic artwork and the way in which it illustrates a world that is both grotesque yet inexhaustibly beautiful, allowing for both of these qualities to exist simultaneously without being in conflict with one another. Somewhere between these seemingly opposite things - dark and light, brutality and sweetness, freedom and fear - reality lies.
I allow my viewer to confront feelings of powerlessness in a destabilized world and the trauma we are left with after the Covid 19 pandemic. Gruesome religious imagery of human suffering, such as the passion of Christ, taps into our most primal and visceral feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Yet such imagery functions as a way for society to make sense of and assign meaning to our own suffering as individuals, which can at times feel meaningless. My work describes dystopia, the cynicism and nihilism of our modern world, and man’s inhumanity to man. I want to help my viewers learn to still find beauty, and perhaps even humor, amidst the fear and struggles of daily life without turning away from these things.
Calla Donofrio 2024