Justin Craun skirts the periphery of his medium by committing his talents to meticulously tousled visuals engendering at once elements of cubism, surrealism and photo-realism. His multiple-personality attack on the canvas clues the viewer into a self-imposed conflict of intent within the painter, showing that he is not satisfied in simply producing highly skilled, surreal, photo-realist renderings of snap-shots on canvas. To the contrary, as his own first critic, he seems to turn on his creations and elevate them to the kinetic pieces we see. Carefully deranging features and thus magnifying their haunted qualities, Craun unveils dark truths about his subjects through distortions which come across as x-rays of the skinless anatomy of life itself. Glowing eyes, exposed enlarged teeth, insouciant children colored in negative -- these are the sufferings, slings and arrows of Craun's people presented in bold palettes some critics find objectionable. Nevertheless, like so many controversial artists of the past, Craun is beautifully corrupting the specific -- his paintings -- for the sake of purifying the general -- art itself.
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