How different are we from the animals we cage, pet, and study? We like to believe our intelligence, our self-awareness, that sets us apart. But scroll through a newsfeed, fall into a marketing funnel, or witness how easily fear and desire are manipulated, and it becomes clear: our so-called higher mind is still yoked to something primal. Something ancient. The lizard brain is still in control.
Cristina Starr’s work dives headlong into this emotional undercurrent, the raw, instinctual terrain we share with other animals. Her paintings explore love and lust, violence and greed, alienation and yearning. These aren’t abstract concepts in her world; they’re living, breathing forces. Set against a backdrop of global catastrophe and constant connection, her work echoes the brutality of war and the helplessness of watching it unfold on a screen. One painting confronts the genocide in Gaza head-on, while others evoke the endless churn of global conflict, asking: are we truly moral beings, or as Thomas Hobbes once claimed, beings with no moral compass kept in check by the rule of law?
Yet Cristina’s lens is not always so apocalyptic. Her gaze is also tender, curious, and attentive to the poetry of the everyday: pigeons in Central Park, a masked Dunkin’ Donuts server, the chaotic streets of India filled with people, vehicles, and activity.
Often, reality cracks open. In one surreal painting, a man on a Canary Wharf balcony is embraced from behind by a many-eyed creature – comforting or consuming, it’s hard to say.
The many eyes also feature in another work, where a woman escapes a bog filled with them. This reminded me of the sense that we’re constantly being surveilled by our phones and CCTV cameras – the author Shoshana Zuboff has stated that we live in an age of Surveillance Capitalism.
It also reminded me of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. In this prison, no prisoner knows whether they are being watched and therefore behaves as if they are constantly being watched. Thanks to technology, it often feels like a large chunk of the world is one giant panopticon, and that’s reflected in Cristina’s work.
Art history references are explicit in works like ‘The Night Visitor,’ in which a foreign entity visits a sleeping individual. It reminded me of William Blake’s ‘Incubus,’ where a demon sits atop a sleeping woman’s chest. Her anatomical drawings often feature people in poses resembling Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. However, Cristina’s paintings are far gorier as a woman has her organs revealed and carries a skull in each hand, or a man lies prone after a raven carries away the genitals of a mutilated man to feed its chicks. This last painting, Raven’s Parting Gift, is on view until May 26 in the exhibition “Banana Show” at Art and Talking Centre in Chipping Norton.
Cristina Starr’s work doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it holds up a mirror—not to our ideal selves, but to the strange, tender, brutal creatures we still are. In her world, the line between human and animal is not a boundary, but a blur.
You can find more about Cristina Starr’s work through her website and Instagram.
All images copyright Cristina Starr.
