Artist Feature: Inside the Mind of José Insunza
“Reality is not enough”
Step into the artistic world of José Insunza and you will find yourself in a dreamscape that is sacred, profane, and effortlessly transportive. His digitally manipulated photographs are collages of the visual subconscious: subtle pop culture motifs, women holding ships, anthropomorphic monkeys, giant flowers. “My pictures are kind of like a Tarantino film,” he chuckles, “taking bits and pieces from other movies to make something better than the original.”
Insunza’s unique creative style is a product of the digital age, which has opened the gates to endless new avenues of artistic exploration. It has also opened a Pandora’s Box of new and increasingly relevant questions in aesthetic philosophy, such as “What makes an image real?” and “How does digital art become fine art?” Not only that, it has revealed new dimensions to older ones, like “Can we separate art from the artist?” — because, in a time of unprecedented visual data, it becomes especially difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins.
I carried this spirit of inquisition with me as I sat down to talk with Insunza, a Spanish-born photographer whom I consider to be a visionary artist. As a self-proclaimed “hyperbolic person”, Insunza infuses his perspective into portraits through the larger-than-life flourishes afforded by editing software. “Photoshop is my primary medium,” he tells me. “What I do is creative photography — using the photo to paint a picture digitally.”
Digital editing is both trendy and taboo in social media (consider the popularity of #nofilter), as it blurs the lines of reality in what some consider dishonest ways. But Insunza employs this tool to do something radically different. The lines blur, yes, but with precise intention, enabling him to shock the eye with his vivid portraits of people and their eccentricities. Far from diminishing the authenticity of the subjects, his use of Photoshop makes their multi-dimensional forms visible to the naked eye.
Early in our conversation, Insunza makes it clear that there is little difference between his playful outlook and the realm he builds in his photography. “I’m always making fun of myself or how I perceive things,” he explains. “I ‘Photoshop’ my world.”
Indeed, Insunza’s world is unmistakably present throughout his work. He tells me more than once of his fascination with people and their divergent qualities. “The things people don’t want to talk about are the things I’m most interested in,” he admits. “I gravitate naturally to people on the edge. Most of my friends are tattoo artists, martial artists, generally people that embrace all parts of life.” It’s no surprise that these perspectives are common themes in his photographs.
Each image begins with a vision. “I always have to have the idea first. I’ll talk to someone that’s a good fit and we start in the studio so I can make sure the lighting, angles, and perspective match the vision.” Often, the people in these photographs are his friends. But rather than simply serving as figures in the frame, his subjects also inform the content and meaning of his work.
"The Chicken Virgin" by José Insunza
Consider this image of a woman with a chicken for a heart from his Virgin series. As a tattoo artist, Insunza recalls, “She was telling me a story of her first tattoo drawing. She was trying to draw a heart and it ended up looking like a chicken. I was going to make [this version of the photo] as a joke,” he laughs, “but then it looked so good, I decided to keep it!” The aura around her head is the tattoo artist’s own work, which weaves her unique expression into the piece. The result is an intimate portrait that is at once transcendent and disruptive.
This image also underscores Insunza’s willingness to intertwine the sacred and the profane. As he explains, “The Virgin is something very sacred for many people, but as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.’ Tattoos are kind of rebellious, so when you combine sacred imagery with a taboo it looks cheeky, but not offensive.”
Women feature prominently in Insunza’s work, which can also be understood as a reflection of his world. While the female form has inspired his art, however, his exploration of femininity goes far beyond aesthetics. He tells me about his upbringing surrounded by women, emphasizing the way his family valued respect. “Most of my depictions of women are not very sexual, even if they are naked. For me, it’s a way to show admiration,” he says. “In the pictures where women are more naked or vulnerable, I want to see the power in them, in their eyes and posture.”
"The Mother" by José Insunza
Indeed, Insunza’s depictions of women are refreshingly non-objectifying and non-reductive. Whether the women they show us are dancing, crying, or bleeding, each photo seems to open a portal into the complexity of the subject. In “The Mother”, for example, a woman breastfeeds her baby. She is in a dark and inhospitable environment, but her serene stability evokes the vulnerability and bravery of motherhood — quite a divergent perspective from the blissful eroticism of popular post-partum photography.
A recent photograph from his stripper series offers another example. The photo, titled “Vampirella”, depicts a woman riding a bat. “This series is very collaborative. Strippers tend to be sexualized, but all of them perform in a different way and have their own thing going on.” Most people are accustomed to seeing images of sex workers, but rarely are these images actually about the person. In this provocative series, there is also a thoughtful celebration of performance and sexual empowerment without an agenda. “I’m using the parts of a person that I know to make a picture that says, ‘this is what I see about you’ — and, at the same time, to turn their dreams into reality.”
"Vampirella" by José Insunza
For many people, of course, Photoshop continues to be associated with exaggeration, even outright falsehood; nevertheless, for Insunza, it is a means to create art that is deeply authentic and self-reflective in its storytelling. As the art world adapts to social media and questions of relative value in a market saturated with images, Insunza’s work makes a strong case for the value of digital editing software as a medium for fine art, and it speaks to the hopeful capacities of similar technologies. It’s been said that our tools are only as big as our imagination; if so, then perhaps our use of digital technology can help us expand our own vision of ourselves, as we, like Insunza, explore the edges of our possibility — and our humanity.
For more about José Insunza, follow him on Instagram.
Published Sep 30, 2020
Updated Jan 25, 2024
Published in Issue VIII: Art
