While Brooklyn-based painter Dean Monogenis is obsessed with architecture—an interest that began after 9/11, when he “realized that [buildings] were like people in that they could live and die,” he recently told Wired—he has zero interest in actually learning the technical aspects of design. He much prefers to keep his work in that middle-gray area between the surreal and real, where the ultra-modern homes he paints look somewhat possible at first, yet perhaps less so as one looks a little closer. “In a painting you can completely ignore things like gravity and engineering,” he says. “As a painter I am free to make a building as plausible or implausible as I like.”
Gizmodo sums up Monogenis’ scenes, which often feature scaffolding, cranes, and other construction elements, as “outlandish homes on impossible sites,” adding, “it’s as if the entire series is based on an architect’s renderings for a massive speculative development planned for a growing population, unearthed long after that civilization had vanished.”
Painting by Dean Monogenis via Wired
Head to Wired for more of Monogenis’ work. For other eye-popping examples of architectural paintings, see: Paul Davies’ Pop Art-esque midcentury houses, Sunga Park’s dream-like watercolors of European buildings.
· Gorgeous Architectural Paintings From a World Without Gravity [Wired Design via Gizmodo] · All Artistry coverage [Curbed National]