Stefan Thelen, also known as Super A, is an artist from the Netherlands. He uses traditional painting techniques to deconstruct our well-known cartoon, fairy tale and pop culture characters. He created the series “Trapped” in which he “peels away” the surface of iconic personages revealing what’s really hiding inside of them. His unique style relies on both playing with stereotypes and really detailed imagery, and invokes associations with the “revealing the face behind the mask” style of psychology.
Super A’s act of apostasy is refusing the surface identity prescribed by a culture that equates maturity with the renunciation of itself from myth and metaphor, scrubbing away magic and ceremony and childhood. The paintings are bold and rich, but the repetition of wrapping one “thing” in only one “ribbon” might be a limiting tendency, a minor criticism for a beautifully realized body of work.
More: Stefan Thelen, Instagram
