Andriy Halashyn and Luis Cornejo

Artist Reception Thursday January 6, 2011
Additional reception Thursday February 3, 2011

Emerging global sensations Andriy Halashyn and Luis Cornejo, both represented exclusively in the United States by saltfineart, come to the Laguna Beach gallery after having their work circle the globe. Both are hot. Both have been sold out in Latin America, Asia and Europe. And the one place you can see them is at the only Orange County gallery that specializes in Latin Contemporary – saltfineart.

Wedding pop and hyperrealism, Halashyn’s dystopic dreamscapes juxtapose moneyed beauty with ruin, waste and contamination.  His canvases tell a tale of two cities in the optic language of a deadpan and painterly pop. A neon green chemically contaminated river runs through a beautiful backdrop reminiscent of Venice, a plucky and cherubic baby plays with garbage and an artificially indigo blue kid collects waste.

Cornejo paints with cheek.  He dons pretty young things with Mickey Mouse ears, tails, clownish caps and surrealistically long hands, marring their exquisite beauty.  By using slapstick and coarse distortion, Cornejo challenges our idea of perfect beauty and our tedious worship of it.  Like Halashyn, Cornejo’s aesthetic is hyperreal—- but Cornejo fuses oil and acrylic to seamlessly combine stunning realism with a highly stylized, flat 2-dimentional style.