Assume for a second about what involves thoughts whenever you hear “soda.” Maybe fizzy, saccharine, and vibrant? Then contemplate the connotations of the phrase “bitter.” Perhaps it evokes the zing of a lemon, tanginess, or one thing sharper. That is the connection that types the premise of Bitter Soda Studio, a venture constructed upon twenty years of illustration expertise with a playful and barely unsettling view of a few of the most urgent problems with the Anthropocene.
“It didn’t come from a change of course, or from a manifesto,” says the artist, who prefers to stay unnamed. “It got here from one thing less complicated: the necessity to say various things with a special voice.” In these vibrant, usually absurd works with titles like “Plastic Wind” and “The Siren’s Catch,” people’ management over their environment is only a fantasy. Clouds mimic the shapes of timber, tiny figures maintain onto botanicals floating within bubbles, and completely oblivious festival-goers ignore a polar bear’s plight on a shrinking chunk of ice even because it mauls one in every of them to demise.
Bitter Soda Studio’s strategy is sort of a little bit of a visible side-eye, nodding with an air of darkish humor to the anxieties and societal disconnect across the local weather disaster and humanity’s function within the stability of nature. A lumberjack whacks at a tree that’s already on fireplace. A crocodile disappears into the comb with all however a pool cleaner’s arm. And mermaids are fished from the ocean like tuna and later canned in engaging packaging. Aren’t sirens recognized for engaging people into the depths?
The artist started by tinkering with concepts on paper, then rendering vectors on an iPad. Over time, what he describes as a “visible alphabet” started to emerge that consisted of easy types and colours and a world of transitional landscapes and suspended figures, animals, and crops. They’re all “photographs that may be poetic, ornamental, narrative, or one thing more durable to call,” he says. “Lots of them contact on nature, ecosystems, consumption, and the connection between folks and the world they stay in.”
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