Miho Hirano and Nicoletta Ceccoli share dreamlike oil paintings of fantasy worlds, vulnerability and seduction

Hirano is known for her dreamy oil paintings, inhabited by ephemeral spirits at one with their natural surroundings. Her new series Recollection represents a world where humans and nature can coexist, communicating a delicate beauty through the use of soft colours and fluid brushstrokes.

"I'm trying to express a single landscape on the canvas through the motif of nature and accessories that are familiar to the viewer," Hirano tells Creative Boom. "I have been working on this concept for a long time, but this time, I made it with the theme of recollection or remembrance. The world I draw is 'fancy'...but I’m creating works that look back on life's memories. This new body of work expresses the emotion and scenes of my past, with a little sadness and healing, and sometimes soaked in sentiment."

Also on show is Ceccoli’s series Relazioni Pericolose, which translates to 'Dangerous Liaisons', depicting a beautiful and bizarre wonderland dreamworld. There is a dash of shy seductiveness behind each of the works from the world-renowned children’s book illustrator. Child-like fantasy scenes are punctuated with anxieties from the artist’s adulthood: choices that must be made, demons that haunt us, and the beauty that conceals the danger. Sometimes, precarious girls can be seen enticing the man. While in other artworks, the girls are seduced by evil creatures in a struggle between the omnipresent forces of love and death, pleasure and pain.

Ceccoli shares, "These new works embody many of the recurring themes and obsessions that inhabit my universe and reveal my 'darker sides'. The fear of being hunted, hurt by others, losing myself in a relationship, both fear and desire of taking possession of the beloved, and falling under the control of someone else."

Ceccoli's narratives often tap into the world of the funny and macabre, the pretty and violent, the disturbing and delectable. She adds: "I make up visual stories that address the dilemmas, illusions and fears that are so personal, yet are also universal. Just like in life, there is duality in my work. Nothing is completely black or white. A story that is either all good or all evil feels like it is missing something. Life is like that as well – you can’t have the good without the bad."

Recollection and Relazioni Pericolose opens on Saturday 2 November at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles and runs until 7 December 2019.