Julio Stanly Flores

The powerful, uncanny beauty of Julio Stanly Flores’ oil paintings exists, as he puts it, “at the moment of creation and destruction.” For the Pennsylvania-based Guatemalan-American artist, such instants of pure, ecstatic energy occur as his stylized, hyperrealist figures pass over thresholds in their indeterminate, vacuum-like settings, faces frozen in expressions that simultaneously evoke crippling pain and transcendent pleasure. Flores skillfully gives birth to his figures, pulling their sharply detailed bodies right out of the surrounding ether. The raw power of that act registers in their faces, and in the eye of the viewer.