REVIEW: Guy UsinU – Oil & fetish

Guy UsinU

Oil & fetish

This fine art book presents a collection of Brighton based oil painter Guy UsinU’s works, I’d seen some of his work around town so had an idea of the rich gilded realist images UsinU paints. A study in oils of fetish adventures and Brighton folk but not always together.  UsunU’s gothic indulgences give a Pierre et Gilles feel to the paintings, heavy with metaphor and meaning, but not coy in anyway. This is blatant, proud, sexual, electric but controlled, guided, a tease of oil on canvas. Suffused with humour this is self-aware art, toying with irony.  Each page featuring one full colour image along with a description, sometimes a line or two about the subject matter if a portrait, or something more earthy meant to challenge and elicit more than an initial response, it’s these paintings which are the most fascinating here, providing a fantastically detailed fantasy world of kink and fantasy, but explored in a candid, honest way. UsinU’s exploration of kink, using not only the creations on his canvas but our own gaze and viewpoint issues us with a stark challenge, look away now or look and enjoy and relish the enjoyment of imagination.

The book is an evocative and crepuscular exploration not just of the people and places of Brighton but also the psycho-sexual geography of the artist themselves. Where they lay, pause, linger, what they see, feel and embrace, and what they leave in the echoes of desire, control and abandonment which are captured with such fine detail.   A superb gift for anyone interested in sensual or fetish art, the colour and imagery seduce and draws you in, holding the viewers’ attention.  His portraits are superb, capturing the dignity and personality of his sitters, exploring their faces with a forensic grace, and allowing their intersectional beauty to shine out and perhaps reflecting his own pedigree, coming from a line of fine oil painters.

You can also order prints of the artist’s work, from their website below.

Our now, large hardback : £18 more info or order from the artists website here: www.guyusinuartist.co.uk