Portraits by Marty Kelly from his series lesser spotted birds of paradise.
Throughout this body of paintings, Kelly’s fluid figurative forms and small open faces bare an enigmatic beauty that whispers of disquieting truths, of chaos on pause. Baudelaire saw in Goya’s ‘beautiful’ and ‘distorted’ figures, “a love of the ungraspable, a feeling for violent contrasts, for the blank horrors of nature and for human countenances weirdly animalized by circumstances.” Kelly in these paintings does not portray the vestiges of chaos; rather, he portrays the beautiful essence of being that remains intact despite circumstances. – Jane Ross
