Last Junkies On Earth: Babes in Spookyland - the bizarre contemporary pop art by Ciou

New York City , Amsterdam (KochxBos gallery, read our post), Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, California, Portland, Rome, Berlin, and a solo show at Seattle´s Roq La Rue: The unapologetical artist Ciou from Toulouse, France, made them all singing her highest praises. As from now the Last Junkies On Earth also do, how does it come?

In her paintings and drawings, drawn on a base of vintage papers she found in old sheets of music, medical books or dictionaries, Ciou reproduces a whole set of post-modern codes and neo-classical elements. Punkrock, Baroque, Art Nouveau, traditional tattoo, Comic, Japanese culture and Gothic are just some main elements she uses to bring up her highly skilled dark and sweet fairytales. Ciou developed the innocent highschool journal scrawls of teen-goth-girls and pre-emo-kids into a fascinating post-Tim-Burton-wonderland. Her paintings and drawings are highly detailed structures filled vibrantly with acrylic and ink. Your eyes can´t get close enough to capture all the tiny coloured combs on the main layer and once you started, you´ll gonna get sucked into her world of bizarre. Her floating spooky girls and their animal friends, significants for youth and virginity, deal playfully with the morbid present of death and demise. Her girls´ playgrounds are the graveyards in our minds. The older we get, the more we might get lost in the dark side of her images. The sweet innocent blurs faster and faster until it vanishes and is gone. Thanks to Ciou that she brings back all our unawakened reminiscences. Kittenish she combines them with our somber expectations of life. That´s how Ciou cheekily reminds everyone of us what real life is: a little bit of sweet and a little bit of sour.

Find more Ciou art and infos on http://www.ciou.eu/
[Click paintings to enlarge]