Victor Pross--Art World Underdog

By William O’Higgins

When it comes to his favorite art form, Victor Pross says he’s getting a bad rap.

“The art snobs look down their noses at caricature,” Pross says, explaining he believes the genre he works in is so often excluded from what’s traditionally billed as art.

He’s studied fine art himself, but now Pross combines traditional techniques with the more zany offshoots of his imagination to criticize people and ideas.

“[Caricature] can be a legitimate art form, not for simply editorial purposes,” asserts the artist.

Constantly evolving, his work currently consists of cunningly painted and sketched caricatures of prominent cultural and political personalities such as Sylvester Stallone, Jean Chretien, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger.

In his art, Pross looks at culture and its estimate of worth, and proclaims much of it false, jaded and humorless.
His paintings are frequently funny and striking in grotesque exaggeration, but they are always powerfully able to reintroduce us to that which we take for granted.

Pross’ talent leaps from the frame, and the detailed precision of his work it impossible to ignore.

Then there is Pross himself, impassioned and intense yet easy to talk to, open and friendly. These contradictions are much a part of Victor Pross’ art as the gouache and boards that hold his vision.

His paintings do not always make fun of their subjects, however.

“I’d say in a lot of cases they are lampoons but a lot of times they’re not,” he says.

Not particularly flattering, many of Pross’ works are a humorous homage to the unsuspecting model—whether it be his appreciation for their work, the way that his subject looks, or a strong reaction to their public actions.

For Pross, the goal of the artist is to reflect the exterior world in the looking glass of the artist’s vision.

This glass distorts and twists, but it also reveals.

With Files from Carla Tonelli