A series of blue ballpoint pen
drawings
capturing capitalist executives and far-right leaders as
grotesque monsters in suits.
It stares grimly out of its wide-open bloodshot eyes, while the row of
tentacles concealing its oral fissure seem to judder voraciously. The
membrane covering the next one's head is so thin you can see its brain
bulging out beneath it. Still others have flat reptilian faces or canine
heads, trunks, beaks, pointed ears, feelers and/or teeth sticking up
through the tops of their heads. Wherever you look you'll see warts,
bristly, pathologically proliferating tufts and mops of hair, staring
cyclops' eyes, droopy ears, impish toothless grins, ginormous eyes with
multiple pupils. And in between, details of their sleeves, cufflinks and
shirt buttons displaying skulls, as if from a mail-order catalogue of
horror.
Monsters in Suits neatly lines up this whole cabinet of horrors
in a series of mock-official busts. The bigshots of politics and business
are captured and caricatured here in dark blue ballpoint. But these aren't
straightforward portraits of Nestlé's CEO (“Water is not a human right”),
the head of the Ku Klux Klan or the ringleaders of far-right youth groups.
They are distorted and mixed up by the subconscious into grotesque
monsters and bogeymen, each fitted out with the trappings of
respectability: namely a suit and tie. They're ready for
business—whatever the cost to the welfare of the world. Here, for once,
they show their true colors—and their true mugs.
Nicolas Frey (born 1992 in Zurich, where he lives and works) is a
freelance artist. He studied fine arts at the Zurich University of the
Arts and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.