Demian Divine

Demian Divine (b. Turin, Italy) lives and works between Italy and France.

Divine’s approach to the tradition is wild and primitive but through photography the work is liberated from established ways of being. Blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration, the artist creates mid to large-scale photographs delving deeply into the collective consciousness of humanity. The intersection between the physical and the digital is the center of his creative aim. He is looking for a somewhat state of confusion in which it is not easy to understand where the digital begins and the physical ends, and vice versa. Divine immerses himself in this hybrid dimension because he thinks it perfectly reflects the state of our society, a place where we are merged with our digital identities, sometimes letting the dichotomy of this dimensional clash overwhelm us; this research is a deep examination of the psychic effects that the encounter between tradition and technology creates. 

Divine grew up with a deep interest in literature, philosophy and gnosticism, which heavily influenced his paintings and photography, so evocative titles are used in a poetic manner to reflect deeper meanings and cultural references. The artist is inspired equally by the Indian doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, the mysticism of Western Esotericism, as well as the digital culture and industrial advances of our time, with a particular focus on classical, yet ever-present, aesthetic needs of color and form.

The human figure has long preoccupied artists of all times; its story dominates the history of Art. In its imagination and in its image-making we find clues to how artists have grappled and engaged with the political and socio-cultural moods and attitudes of their times. We are in a time of renewed and committed interest in figurative painting, and Divine uses the figure - constrained and liberated from traditional support - as a many-sided prism in order to examine and interrogate the contemporary crucibles of gender, fiction and magic.