The Whimsical World of Souther Salazar

by Peter Aleksa

Souther Salazar is an up and coming young artist who lives and works in the Los Angeles area. Despite being a relative newcomer to the Los Angeles art-scene, the 27-year-old artist has steadily garnered an expansive underground fan base. A graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, one of the top graphic design schools in the world, Salazar has displayed his work at a number of successful exhibitions in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo.

In addition to his gallery exhibits, Salazar has also created numerous zines and comics, had a series of his textile patterns printed by the California based Alexander Henry Fabrics, and most recently he wrote and illustrated a children’s book entitled “Destined for Dizziness!”

With his crowded works overflowing with brightly colored images, Salazar shares a certain stylistic kinship with artists working in various forms of street art—an artistic current most recognizable for producing the 1980s avant-garde artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but notable as well for the rise of more recent artists such as Dalek and Swoon. In a similar sense, so to does the composition of Salazar’s works, constructed from a wide assortment of materials—blending collages, drawings, and paintings to create intricately layered installations displaying an assorted medley of textures as well as images.

It’s not often that one would describe an artist working in Salazar’s medium as a storyteller, but that is exactly what Salazar is. Drawing on the broad tradition of comic illustration and comics-as-art, Salazar plays with the traditional written and illustrated aspects of comic art, fashioning his paintings and drawings into a series of nostalgic mini-narratives and illustratives romanticizing the notion of childhood. Reinterpreting the world around him through the anything-is-possible view of adolescence, he creates whimsical landscapes full of carnivals and lost cities overflowing with childlike images of dinosaurs, robots, giant insects, and strange new creatures that overtake the real-world elements present.

These fanciful images lend the works an undeniable sense of innocence and wonder that contrasts with representations of the physical world that often belie a foreboding sense of the dark reality of modern life. This uneasiness is essentially washed away by the childlike inventions that become the focus of the works. While it looms in the background, it is not the sinister face of reality that Salazar ultimately wants to portray but rather the captivating nature of childhood invention; to capture that enchanted time when make-believe mattered and for a fleeting moment everything was going to be okay. You can check out selected works by Souther Salazar displayed on his personal website, or buy merchandise featuring the work of Salazar and like-minded artists at the Giant Robot Store.