Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages (born 24 December 1919) is a french painter, engraver, and sculptor. Born in Rodez, Aveyron, in 1919, Soulages also is known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour, "...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own". He sees light as a matter to work with; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to make the light reflect, allowing the black to come out from darkness and into brightness, thereby becoming a luminous colour.

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Centre Pompidou
Soulages Museum
Pierre Soulages website

Lucifer Rising

1972, from Kenneth Anger, an American underground experimental filmmaker, also follower of Aleister Crowley's "Thelema". The score was meant to be composed by Jimmy Page, but was actually the work of Bobby Beausoleil, a Charles Manson family associate who is currently serving a life sentence.
With : Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, Marianne Faithfull, Chris Jagger, Donald Cammell...

Wiki

Joel-Peter Witkin

"Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings."(more...)

The artist speaks of his works at the BnF exhibition "Heaven or Hell" in Paris, France.

Wikipedia
Artnet
Interview @horvatland.com

Cornelis Van Haarlem

Cornelis Corneliszoon Van Haarlem (1562 – 1638), mannerist painter and draughtsman, was one of the leading Northern Mannerist artists in The Netherlands.

He had a certain sense of humor, as his characters got dirty feet and his Venus has filthy nails...

Wiki

Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert

I went to Luxembourg for Christmas and stayed there a few days, visiting the town (Vauban fortifications) and its museums (they really got great museums). This is where I met the astonishing works of Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert.
In the MUDAM, there was their installation for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, called "Collision Zone", depicting the gloomy zones of the Mediterranean area, where two worlds collide, Africa and its (illegal) immigrants, and the "fortress Europe" with its more and more restrictive politics about immigration.

In the Casino Luxembourg there was just an installation left, called "Unground". I immediately felt their distinctive mark, and the sound was also something I thought I knew but didn't recognize at first. I learnt shortly after that it was a collaboration with Jason Van Gulick and Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), Khanate, Thorr's Hammer...)! It was made over a nearly two year period after the eruption of the icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. The videos range from the London's City, where the new sorcerers (i.e. bankers, traders etc...) make their black rituals, to the frozen landscapes of Iceland where the ice turned black because of the volcano's ashes. The music sounds like a chthonic ritual, the video looks like it was taken through the eyes of an antediluvian creature... Astounding, mesmerizing, frightening... mandatory! Note that there will be a free live show with Jason Van Gulick and Stephen O'Malley the 4th of January, 2013.

Official
Youtube
Vimeo

Arnold Böcklin

Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss symbolist painter of the 19th century.

Influenced by Romanticism his painting is symbolist with mythological subjects often overlapping with the Pre-Raphaelites. His pictures portray mythological, fantastical figures along classical architecture constructions (often revealing an obsession with death) creating a strange, fantasy world.

The best known of his paintings, "The Isle Of The Dead" (of which there were 5 versions), inspired many other artists : H.R. Giger (also Swiss) did two paintings of it in hommage to Böcklin, Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem (Op.29) about it...

Wikipedia
WikiPaintings

Monsù Desiderio

Behind the pseudonym Monsù Desiderio there are in fact two painters from the 17th century, François de Nomé (~1592 - ~1623) and Didier Barra (~1590 - ~1656), both originally from Metz, France, and installed in Naples, Italy.

Their work, enigmatic and surprising (ruins, cataclysms, fantastic architectures...), has multiple sources of inspiration (Antic Rome, Ancient Testament, New Testament, Naples...)

They were considered by André Breton as precursors of surrealism.