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Sam Branton’s work combines imagery from our shared visual library of classic images – portraiture, baroque paintings, film noir – into which he introduces a weird and wonderful cartoon cast into the mix a cartoon style: Hieronymus Bosch meets Ren & Stimpy in search of the Maltese Falcon. His portraits began with simple cartoon balloon-like heads, from which came other shaped cartoon heads thus creating more characters and families. These ideas led him to produce a family tree of mutants that corrupt and subvert the original image, be it film or painting, until the native inhabitants find themselves in a bizarre tybrid other-world from which there is no escape. Although the pictures are abjectly grotesque, many of their subject’s faces appear cute, kitsch and innocent. It’s this combination that creates a sinister mood and the abnormalities and perversions of the creatures are more effectively offset. By replicating the typical settings and sincere seriousness of the original source images, there is an implication of pride, and this in turn lends the pieces a kind of comic pathos.
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