Crime Scene "revisited"

Yosiell Lorenzo’s work fits into that saying: “never judge a book by its cover”. At first glance, his artwork is all cuteness: cupcakes, cherries and candy. But beneath the facade of frosting and the rainbow sprinkles camouflage, a sadness is stirring. Yosiell uses sweetness to reel us in. Once he has us in his saccharine net, we settle and see beyond the surface: these are cheerless creatures. They are all searching for love. The Sicklings are a troop of Yosiell’s recurring characters who are particularly mopey and needy. Rendered in sexless simplicity, the Sicklings function like anthropomorphic feelings: Frustration, loneliness, despair…Often the Sicklings wear masks. Yosiell uses masks as a device throughout his paintings and three dimensional work. The masks represent dual and hidden identities, as well as society’s attempts to label individuals who resist categorization. Yosiell has dealt with these identity issues first hand. As a gay, Puerto Rican artist, he was often told that he didn’t “look gay” or he was a “fake Rican”. Yosiell was introduced to art in his youth during a time when hip hop and graffiti defined urban culture. Growing up in Bridgeport, CT, he’d hop the train to New York and absorb it all. In Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph.