In need of a smile? Visually ironic portraits.

A gifted painter with a decent university background is just as likely to starve himself to death, trying to sell his paintings, as an amateur self-taught artist. I mean, who needs another landscape when you’ve got google street view in your phone? Who needs another still life, when there are full-size dead sharks in glass boxes floating around?

Way out? Irony and surprise.

Oleg Shuplyak, a Ukrainian artist, gives you something to raise your brow and to smile at.

He’s adding things together to arrive at something bigger than the sum of the parts.

He takes a (self)-portrait + a famous painting of someone famous, for instance:

…to give you Gauguin:

Yes, Gauguin was famous for having virgins on his mind whenever it was not tormented by arguments with Van Gogh. The consequences are well-known.

Some of the ironic images he makes are very clever, and most are instantly recognisable (well…