Roly

(a.k.a. Metatron DarkAngel or Met)
I am a Cuban born Artist who's artistic talents include Pen and Ink, Charcoal Illustration, Acrylics and Digital Art. My work can be seen in comics, ads, billboards, and some pirated pieces scattered all over the internet. Among my influences I lists: Frank Frazetta, Gaugin, and my favorite, Rembrandt.

I was the Asst. Art Director for Studio Fineman in Miami where I honed my skill as a graphic designer, which kept food on the table and the creditors at bay. I was the Art Director for the producers of one of the best rums to come out of Cuba, Matusalem Rum. For a while I sold myself piece by piece as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator.

Currently I am the Art Director for Diamonds International, the largest jewelry retailer in the Caribbean. If I had to name the greatest influence on my creative perception it would have to be-Frank Frazetta. As a small boy of 10 or 11, growing up a Southern Baptist minister's son, Frazetta's work was considered taboo. The images of blood, demons, and bare-naked ladies that filled his paintings went against everything I was taught; yet I was so attracted to it. I don't know what it was that drove me to his work, but from the first time I saw a book in the local B.Daltons I was hooked.

I would sneak the books into the house and hide them to flip through and copy what I could at night underneath the sheets with a flashlight. As far back as I can remember I have been interested in the dark side of things. As a child it was Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein. As a teenager it was heavy metal, punk and goth music.

As an adult it is all these things and more. There can be no light without the dark and if you are going to walk in the dark you better have the light. The light can blind you as easy as the dark, it’s a good balance of both that makes one whole. I explore this through the images I create. I have trouble describing my work, so I let an art major do it for me.

- Roly

Looking through Roly's art on this site, one is confronted by immediate defining characteristics of his work: his style and his subject matter.

Roly's artistic style is reminiscent of such greats as Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kirchner and Nagel. Using bold dark lines to outline and shade and vehemently restricting vigorous colors especially bring the legacy of Patrick Nagel to mind. The genius of capturing a likeness of beauty without the soft glow of light and shading is inherent to Nagel and is becoming more vivid in Roly's work.

Roly's ability to bring form and feeling together while maintaining a semi-minimalist and almost 20's decorative aloofness is at once contradictory and sententious.

The simple bold lines convey minimalism while exuding a dark energy. Roly's figures are realistic, while remaining simple of form, and emanate the fantastic with aplomb and viciousness.

The emotion behind his fantastic subject matter is at once primal and intense while remaining flat, remote. The conviction in the poses, the virulent and even caustic gazes, the cruel grins and the slashing use of red create an aura of brutality and ferocious emotion. However Roly's flat rendering of lines and figures and use of bold color, keep that emotion and that dark energy in its own plane of existence.

One can view the emotion but can't quite grasp it, as if the piece is more of a window directing to an alternative reality.

While one may sense the happenings of that reality, one is ultimately removed from it. Nagel's work had once been called 'fantastic realism', when looking through Roly's work, one can apply the same quote with the fantastic being the key word.

-Karla Jeske (AKA. Lady K)