The Art of Kikyz1313 

Album cover for Hindi-metal band, Bhayanak Maut (2015)

The first time I saw the works of Mexican-based artist Kikyz1313, I felt the delicate visceral energy and grotesque beauty of her lines, subject matter, and color palette; however, it was not until later (when I read her interviews where she discusses her influences and purpose) when I began to comprehend the intensity that her works portray on a social and conceptual level.

When first confronting her works, one sees a circus of details and a mirage of anatomical and natural elements. Her subjects consistently are children (either alive or deceased) among environments of decay and natural creatures. In her work to the right, an album cover for a Hindi-metal band “Bhayanak Maut” (which translates to terrible or horrific death), a young boy is centered in a circle of bones and fleshy forms. He holds a severed head squarely, which remotely stares into nothing. Two black birds chew at the fleshy circle with their beaks.

The severe detail which exists in this work contrasting with the stark simplicity of the boy’s skin develops a balance to the piece and emphasizes the boy as he glares out of this gruesome circle.

The colors of her works consist mainly of a variety of values of pinks, browns, and blacks, which give a lightness to the dark subjects–a welcoming, familiar nature to something we rarely observe. In most of her pieces, she uses thin lines in order to express the forms, which also contributes to this lightness.

I believe her works are phenomenally evocative and powerful; each of her works greet the viewer with beautiful imagery, yet pull them into a realm of grave and disturbing content. She synthesizes ideas of death, neglect, and innocence with the deliberate thin lines of her pen, and livens the dimensions of her delicate creatures through the use of pastel flesh-tones and dark contrasts of dingy blacks.

In context of her own words…

Why do we ignore the very intimate contents of our own bodies? Why isn’t there a balance between the mundane, tangible world, and the unfathomable cosmos of our fleeting existence?

-Kikyz1313, interview with Samanta Levin of beinArt Collective, via.

I’ve read one full interview of Kikyz1313 (published online at beinart.org, via) and an excerpt from another interview (published online an in print with Juxtapose magazine, via). Within these interviews, she reveals her thought-out concepts that hover very closely to her works, and which gives them such a deliberate and new moving edge.

Aberaccion (2010, detail), ink

Process and Detail of Why So Lonely?, (2015)

Why So Lonely?, 2015

The Disaster’s Heiress (2014, close-up), graphite, watercolor, white pastel

Within her pieces, she continuously captures the mannerisms of children, from the placements of their hands, to their expressions and actions. In many of her works, disease and deformities also act as a major theme within the piece. In “Aberaccion”, an earlier piece from 2010, Kikyz exaggerates an infant’s cleft lip to the point of unrecognizable deformity. This dramatic expression of line moves the eye up and around the shapes of the infant’s head, and allows the viewer to gaze and feel the infant’s placement in space.

In her interview with Samantha Levin, she says that her pieces help her to express not only what the viewer takes in at the surface, but also her own beliefs towards humankind’s protection against abnormalities and death in societies throughout time. In her interview with Juxtapose magazine’s Hannah Stouffer, she says that death is more a part of our lives than we acknowledge, and that deadly events are something “we usually live through but…we never give them the significance they deserve”. Mortality is something we are confronted with every second of our lives, as well as every living creature, which she resoundingly addresses within her pieces.

“I don’t think I could ever imagine dark artwork with positive or encouraging purposes. Dark artwork is, at its essence, blatantly raw, and to attribute positivity to it is an incongruity that undermines dark art’s very definition.”

-Kikyz1313,  interview with Samanta Levin of beinArt Collective, via.

Her upbringing in Mexico has acted as a nurturer of these contradictions between death and innocence, as she describes…Although tying her poses as a dismal outlook on her country, she chooses to “be aware…and embrace [the disadvantages and blessings of Mexico] somehow” through her life and work.

She challenges people to do the same among art, as she argues that “people find it easier to stick with art that is purely aesthetically pleasing rather than step out of our comfort zones with more intellectually challenging and visceral art expressions.”

Numbed Pallor (2015, close-up), 9.2 x 7.7 in

Lethe’s River (2015, close-up)I am excited to see her further works and what other grueling and vital emotions she will inspire within her viewers next. Her works have greatly influenced not only my own drawings, but also my ideas towards art and its ability to synthesize and evoke countless (whether deliberate or non-deliberate) ideas and emotions at once. 

For more information about Kikyz1313 and her personal descriptions of her technical and conceptual processes, visit, like, and follow her Facebook page, via.

For more high-resolution viewings of her full portfolios as well as information about purchases, visit her website, via.