The Hideous Photo Art of Aeron Alfrey

Aeron Alfrey is a newer artist to the scene of fantastic horror. Still, just glimpsing a few of his malignant terrors is enough to easily see why he is gaining steam and prestige in dark circles. This trend was recently confirmed this year, by Alfrey's award for horror art from the International Horror Guild. As with most striking artists of the grotesque, Alfrey mixes a distinct vision of the world with a uniqueness of style. Aeron's chosen method, if one can be pointed to in all his works, focuses on bleak, shadowy surrealism. Beyond that, the artist's work comes closer than most to what can best be described as photographing nightmares. And as the cameraman, each one of Alfrey's images conveys the overall blurred, unspeakable horrors of the dreamlands, but with individual parts brought to hair-raising clarity in their detail. This makes for pieces not only shocking in the sheer number of monstrosities lurking in each one, but also work that can be mistaken for no other artist.

Alfrey presents surreal demons uniquely his own, but like other great fantasists, owes a good deal of his influence to literary sources. Not surprisingly, H.P. Lovecraft clearly impresses himself on more than a few Alfrey works. However, these ghastly collages re-imagine HPL's creations quite unlike other renderings of his cosmic oddities. Alfrey also takes his cue from a less likely literary weird monger: Thomas Ligotti. If he is not the first real Ligottian artist, then he is certainly the most impressive to date. In fact, it was his gallery hosted at Thomas Ligotti Online that won him early acclaim across the online world, and played a heavy role in securing him his award from the IHG. One need only flip through this excellent internet art gallery to experience the rich, weird horror of the Ligottian worldview through Aeron's art, in this case, complemented by ambient music. Grungy nightmares, festering derelicts, and the suggestion of a mystical oblivion are a testament to Alfrey's keen ability to capture the intellectual horrors of Ligotti so effectively.

Hopefully, Alfrey's IHG award, inclusion in prestigious Lovecraftian art catalogs like the luxurious Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, and experimentation with new mediums will ensure a major breakthrough for the artist. Aside from the Ligottian gallery linked above, Alfrey showcases a good many of his works at his blog, "The Mutated Skeleton Cave." And for Italian readers, the blog "In Tenebris Scriptus" wrote up their own nice entry on Alfrey back in November.

-Grim Blogger