Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208821 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 80 pages

Customer Reviews

Subversive Beauty
The art contained in this book is extremely beautiful. Most viewing this will already be at least somewhat familiar with Royo's style and the degree of talent he has, but for those who aren't: Luis Royo paints dark, sensual, and occasionally very explicit images of fantasy, predominantly females in fantasy. Most of his work has some sexual connection, with themes involving 'beauty and the beast' encounters and extreme tattooing and piercing.

Subversive Beauty's paintings (the book also includes sketches of most of the work, showing how the painting was developed; these are a very welcome addition) are far more subtle than much of Royo's other work, and none of the images are very violent or graphic (in contrast to the Prohibited books), despite it focusing almost entirely on a single figure in most instances, with little in the way of background or action depicted. There is some minor nudity, but every image is so detailed, beautiful, and nigh photo-realistic that the sexual side of Subversive Beauty is secondary to the wonderful fantasy scope presented. All of the images are of extremely high quality, and the book is very nicely presented.
Along with the paintings (and sketches) themselves, there is an introduction talking about the worlds and themes from which the paintings come (with many references to Greek mythology and similar sources), and many of the images are also accompanied by a few paragraphs of story. These stories are interesting and give insight into the imagination and reasoning behind details of the images, but don't really add a great deal to the book. There is also nothing here about Royo's methods or how he created each piece; the entire book is in the spirit of the fantasy, with nothing to remind us it isn't real throughout.

The reason to own this is of course the art itself, and that is beautiful, incredibly imaginative, and inspiring from page to page. I can't recommend this work more highly to anyone who loves fantasy.

A Masterpiece
One of the more contemporary in a long line of evolving portfolios, `Subversive Beauty' is Royo at his Opus Pre-eminent. Reflecting both years of dedication and his debt to the female form, Royo has created a genre all of his own that many aspiring artists of late consider as their objective and aspiration.

I first entered the dark and revolutionary civilization of Luis Royo sometime in 2005 when I bought a copy of one in the provocative `Prohibited' series after being an avid fan of the likes of Vallejo, Serpieri and Frazetta. But it was Royo who was to introduce me to an insurgency in Fantasy Art, where the Gothic and Cyber chic of today have been displayed in electrifying detail and sordid sexiness that his broad palette can portray.

Moving on from his early vocation in the Collection `Women', which in itself, is very reminiscent of 80's movie posters in the vein of `Flash Gordon' and `Masters of the Universe'; Royo's vision of an apocalyptic humanity where man meets machine is both a horrifying and stirring prophecy that has taken the world of art by storm.