(a.k.a. Metatron DarkAngel or Met)

Cuban born Artist whose artistic talents include Pen and Ink, Charcoal Illustration, Acrylics and Digital Art. His work can be seen in comics, ads, and billboards. Also some pirated pieces scattered all over the internet. Among his influences he lists: Frank Frazetta,Tim Bradstreet, Gaugin, and his favorite, Rembrandt. He was the Asst. Art Director for F-Shop in Miami. He was the Art Director for the producers of one of the best rums to come out of Cuba, Matusalem Rum. Now he has joined the world of Freelancing.....selling himself piece by piece...

"If I had to name the greatest influence on my creative perception it would have to be-Frazetta. As a small boy of 10 or 11 growing up a Southern Baptist minister's son, Frazetta's work was considered taboo. The pictures had blood, demons, and bare naked ladies. I don't know what it was that attracted 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."

- Roly

Art Review:

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.

~Lady

(Lady K's website is no longer functioning.)