Malcolm T. Liepke is a self-taught 1953-born artist from Minneapolis known for his splendid style paintings strongly influenced by John Singer Sargent, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Diego Velázquez. His work summarizes the lessons of these great artists that he reinterprets to represent the deepest emotions of portrayed subjects.

His protagonists are beautiful women in glamorous settings, captured with fluid and full-bodied brushstrokes that reveal a certain sensuality of a voyeuristic type. The technique used by Malcolm is to take a cue from a photograph, which is then processed in the form of a painting. Each portrait contains emotions of joy, pain and love (the couple scenes are very reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec), arousing empathy in the viewer.

If you want to stay tuned, visit Malcolm T. Liepke’s Instagram here.

Tattoo artist Canada-based Curt Montgomery is known for his minimal style, which never gives up being cool. His favorite themes are illustrations that deal with death, sex and realities. In every drawing he performs there is always a touch of irony, of veiled genuine sarcasm, accentuated by a fluid, soft and clean stroke.

Minimalism becomes the most immediate type of language to communicate with others in an original and fresh way. Glasses of wine, roses, faces and the inner chaos inside us, become works of art to be worn with great naturalness. If this artist interested you, take a look also at Sanja Stojkov‘s works.

Follow Curt’s work on his Instagram profile that you find here.

From Caitlin McCarthy‘s animated short Coldsore you can extract two morals, one sadder than the other. The London-based director and animator shows us a classic scene that could happen in any high school in the world. On the one hand there is the beautiful and popular girl who even when she contracts a viral virus such as lip herpes does not lose her charm, on the contrary, her companions admire her even more because it means that she kissed someone. On the other side there is the marginalized girl, shy and invisible, who when she discovers that herpes is transmitted by kissing desperately seeks someone on the Internet who is willing to kiss her. 

In the end even the naive protagonist contracts the virus, but the school queen has already passed and she remains the idiot who managed to get herpes transmitted by someone. 

The first, sad, side that the video highlights is the condition that some teenagers live in high school, who are so conditioned by what the most popular ones do that they want to imitate them in every way, regardless of the dangers. 

The second, perhaps even sadder, truth lies in the fact that for many boys and girls the internet is the only source of knowledge and comparison, and their despair leads them to believe everything they read on sites or on social networks. 

Coldsore is a video that makes you think, to watch and to watch again. 

Desert X is a contemporary art festival that exhibits site-specific works in Coachella Valley, south California. After the great success of the first edition, the event has become a regular event that offers innovative and interesting works.

Spcter is the work presented by Sterling Ruby and is inspired by the classic “U.F.O” objects. The monolith appears as a mirage in the middle of the desert, due to its acid orange fluorescent tint. The shade was given by the powder paint with which the aluminum base was painted, on which the sky is reflected.

Halter is instead the installation presented by Erik Mack, realized with 2300 meters of patchwork fabric signed Missoni wraps a disused service station on the border of Salton Sea.

Going Nowhere Pavilion # 01 (Breeze Block, Ben-Day Dot, Coleseum, Möbius Strip, Thought Problem) it’s a Moebius strip made up of reddish concrete blocks, created by the artist Julian Hoerber. The work is inspired by the theory of Jacques Lacan that sees topology as a means of describing the human mind.

Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits of the Desert is the image series created by Cara Romero dedicated to the lands of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Serrano and Mojave. The four photos exhibited show the ancient protagonists who populated these territories

Dive-In is the installation presented by the Danish collective Superflex that sums up the geological origins of the area: it seems that due to the large presence of marine fossils of the site, the Spaniards called the territory with the name of Conchilla, then mistakenly transformed into Coachella. The work was designed with the prospect of surviving the moment when the sea will be there again due to global warming.

Lover’s Rainbow by Pia Camil includes various rainbows installations made of reinforced concrete that represent symbols of peace, equality and encourage the public to change the perspective on the concepts of border and immigration.

Western Flag by John Gerrard is an installation about the delicate topic of the resources exhaustion and consists in the projection of a short movie about the first large oil field in the world, in Texas.

Revolutions di Nancy Baker Cahill, consists of a work in AR/VR that is very reminiscent of the Zabriskie Point explosion scene. With this artwork the concept of Land Art is revolutionized, which no longer has to “sacrifice” the environment to exist. As the artist states:

“Riffing on the idea of the wind farms as an AI garden she fills the air above with what might be the blossoms and blooms of benign technological procreation”.

Visit festival’s site here.