Peruvian artist Antonio Zegarra uses digital media to depict well-known figures as a composite of pattern, color, and photography. Famous faces blend together with a patchwork of buildings, playing cards, magazine pages, or graphic patterns and textures. Each portrait gazes out, establishing direct eye contact with the viewer. Mixing a painterly quality with digital patterns and photographic elements to each figure, Zegarra’s works balance tumult with a cohesive image and gaze. Each piece is large and impactful, sometimes as large as 15 feet tall, towering over the viewer, gazing out from energetic canvases. The composite quality of the work creates smaller areas of abstract interest in each large composition, drawing the eye to the more resolved portions of each figure while contributing variety in the speckled and layered negative space as well.
With a love of American culture and decades of the past since childhood, Zegarra spins pop culture figures into distinct portraits. As a doctor, he applies his interest in human behavior and life to direct and expressive images of some of the most universally recognizable human faces.
