Doce Lar (Home Sweet Home) by Renato Atuato. São Paulo, Brazil, 2011.

I just really identify with this guy in the banana suit. I know how he feels.

Annie Lapin‘s paintings represent a healthy mix of cerebral contemplation and audacious instinct. Framed by centuries of art history, Lapin’s work culls from the conventions of landscape painting and then obscures those familiar elements with unsettling layers of abstraction. I teamed up with Boston-based magazine New American Paintings to interview this renowned painter in her downtown L.A. studio, and take a look at her unique process.

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There’s so much rad art scattered throughout the world, it can all feel little overwhelming. Luckily, in the 21st Century, we have a plethora of mediums through which to disseminate all that radness: the Internet, magazines, coffee table book anthologies– and perhaps the most quaintly archaic of the bunch– art fairs! Fairs provide you with something that none of the above can: a visceral sense of the endlessness of culture. Direct contact with the people who get paid to have good taste. A labyrinth of beautiful objects that you can examine with an awe-inspired scrutiny that even the best computer monitor cannot allow.

New American Paintings and Future Shipwreck teamed up to take a look at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair this year, and ended up speaking with some of the raddest people around: Jessica Silverman of Silverman Gallery (home to Conrad Ruiz and Luke Butler); Wendy Yao of my favorite store on the east side of L.A. (Ooga Booga); Katharine Mulherin, whose gallery represents Winnie Truong, and many others! It felt like going to Disneyland, but with more turtlenecks.

Zone out on the graceful stylings of suave Spanish skater Kilian Martin in this video shoot for British menswear magazine Man About Town.

There’s an atomic afterglow emanating from the paintings of Iva Gueorguieva. They brim with so much kinetic energy, I’d totally understand if you felt a little intimidated by their labyrinthine compositions. But that’s a good thing: Gueorguieva’s work is like a challenge– a taunt inciting you to dig deep below the layers of her shapes and forms. Like an epic mural, your eyes can land almost anywhere on the canvas and find something interesting. Read them backwards and forwards, left and right, and you’ll only uncover more mysterious sub-plots of intense emotion swimming amidst an overarching abstract narrative.

The latest issue of New American Paintings includes a fantastic feature on Iva, penned by the awesome Evan J. Garza. The magazine wanted to delve deeper into Iva’s work and examine her process in action, so we teamed up to make the video above. Iva was gracious enough to allow me into her L.A. studio, where she shared the importance of sound, time and space in her work. Examining those enormous paintings and collages up close, I felt like I might fall in.

Edition #91 of New American Paintings (with a cover by Erik Mark Sandberg) is on newsstands now! Check out more images of Iva Gueorguieva’s work after the jump.

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According to the YouTube page, this piece by Renato Atuati is called Via Crucis, IX – Jesus Cai Pela Terceira Vez. But for the sake of being conversational, let’s just refer to it as “that funny-sad little video with a triangle head dude in garbage bags carrying a street sign and puking in São Paulo.” Because as far as I can tell, that’s what it is, and it’s awesome.

Atuati sent it my way in a mysterious email to me last week, noting that this is his “new stuff,” though I’m not sure where to see his old stuff. No matter, this clip is enjoyable enough– in some unsettling, melancholy way– even devoid of a larger context:

Brilliant graphic designer Mike Perry and his photographer girlfriend Anna Wolf, talking about art and facial hair for the non-profit organization Movember which fights cancer and shaving, two of society’s greatest ills.

Via Matt Rubin!

And now, the most recent video work of Hooliganship: a dream team made up of Peter Burr in collaboration with Christopher Doulgeris. Rather then satiating you with the immediacy of a happy, high energy world of good vibes like in their previous video work, this new piece is an atmospheric search that resonates without immediately melting inside of you.

“faketrap” whispers a dark enigmatic tone bordered by fleeting feelings of uneasiness. The air here seems to be thick and Lose Weight Exerciseed with impermanence. Appearances of warmth are merely cameos and it feels like you have the impossible task of finding humanity in a mixed-up digital world. It reminds me of my struggle with trying to cozy up to the Internet while it remains to me, uninterpretable and cold.

Watch the trailer for Hooliganship’s stellar Cartune Xprez 2010 DVD compilation, below, featuring work from a league of fantastic animators and video artists including Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Jacob Ciocci and Clare Rojas. Previous contributors to the Cartune Xprez DVDs include Takeshi Murata, Bruce Bickford and Shana Moulton. So basically these discs are filled with the work of geniuses.