ONE SMALL SEED MAGAZINE Issue #29 Digital 04 THE BEST OF | Page 24

Part Big Daddy Kane, part Remrandt van Rijn, Mustafa Maluka is taking
the international art scene by storm with a contemporary brand of
portraiture as culturally and stylistically complex as the world we live in.
Dylan Culhane investigates the phenomenon.

prodigal son
mustafa maluka

Eerily penetrative eyes stare out from bleary, dribbled visages
caught in a vice between Pop Art and the Renaissance.
It feels impolite to keep staring, but you just can’t help
it. Combining the zeal of graffiti art with the sensibility of
contemporary graphic design, his work might be called
playful were it not for an air of solemnity in the gaze that
confronts us. Suspended amidst a frenzy of abstract graphic
elements, the facial expressions of his subjects are rendered
with the kind of grace and reverence usually reserved for
religious portraiture, as hypnotic as they are interrogative.
The art of Mustafa Maluka is, if anything, very easy on
the eye. An unnerving realism is offset by the naïveté of
boldly patterned backgrounds that demonstrate a superb
command of colour and composition. Well versed and
actively involved in underground street culture, Maluka’s
style bears traces of the spray-can aesthetic insofar as its
emphasis on decorative cartoon hues. A deft painterly touch
nevertheless distinguishes his technique from that of the
street artist.
Using faces from magazines as his point of departure,
Maluka reworks these anonymous facades into hypothetical
icons in the throes of surreal decay. His characters are birthed
in an imaginary context that transcends place, wealth, class
and religion but remain rooted in a conceivable reality.