Marcus Van Soest

Written by Ed McCormack (Rolling Stone Magazine and former associate of Andy Warhol)

The article has been published in Gallery & Studio, the World of the Working Artist / New York / volume 8 No.4 April / May 2006

At Monkdogz Urban Art, Energy Trumps Irony Every Time...

One such discovery ( at least to New York gallery-goers, although he's apparently widely exhibited closer to home ) is Marcus van Soest , who hails from the Netherlands and comes on like gang-busters with canvases that seem to combine the painterly panache of late-period Phillip Guston, the outrageous plasticity Peter Saul, the sheer zaniness of the revered 1950s Mad magazine cartoonist Basil Wolverton. In his compact figurative compositions, van Soest conjures up a kind of monster mash of fragmented faces, body parts, and- in the case of one visceral canvas-slabs of red meat and fried eggs that seem to express the delicious mess of being embroiled in the human stew. The 14th century Milanese painter Guiseppe Archimboldo's paintings of human heads composed of fruits and vegetables also comes to mind; however van Soest does all of his predecessors one better by virtue of his eclecticism, gaining new meaning, with his bold protoplasmic configurations, to the term 'polymorphous perversity.'