Paul Insect

British artist Paul Insect looks a lot like his paintings: his portraits wear masks that cover their faces, and so does he. “There are two sides to people,” Insect explains, “the side you want everyone to see and the side you would rather keep to yourself.” For Insect, the side he’d rather keep to himself is his physical appearance, staying anonymous by covering his face online and in interviews. He prefers his art to speak for itself – and his effervescent blend of portraiture, Pop Art, Dada and street art certainly has a life of its own. The compositions, made from a mix of collage, painting and printmaking, show faces half hidden by loud block colour and pattern. They often feature Insect’s signature newsprint dots, which call back to the era of printed media. The faces gaze directly at you from the canvas. Their sense of self appears to be bound to the approval of others, much like the photos that populate our Instagram feeds. In the age of the selfie, Insect uses his art to question what we, as social animals, choose to show and hide about ourselves.

Over the decades, Insect has worked hard to cultivate his own artistic language. “It was a conscious decision for me to develop a voice,” he explains. A huge reason for this was that he started out as a commercial artist in the early 1990s, designing video sleeves for films like Basic Instinct and Jacob’s Ladder, long before the heyday of Photoshop. Although it sounds nostalgic now, Insect found it stifling at the time. In his own words, “I got deluded working for other people.” So in 1996, he founded Insect, an art collective based in a small studio on a pre-gentrification Brick Lane in London’s East End. For nearly ten years, the collective created gig flyers and were key players in the East London street art and graffiti scene. In the 2000s, Banksy took an interest in Insect’s work. Soon after, Insect put on his first solo show at Lazarides Gallery, kick-starting his career in the fine art world. Today, Insect continues to draw inspiration from the people around him, and the art remains as alluring and mysterious as the artist himself.