Hans Sures Gives The Combustion Engine The Renaissance Treatment

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Nothing exists in a vacuum. An old idea augmented by new means—it plays itself out over and over again in every facet of society, culture, technology, and art. The balancing act between the novel and the familiar is ever-present in the artwork of Hans Sures, a creative director, designer, and illustrator based in London.
He’s found the sweet spot where his art is recognizable, yet challenging in technique, presentation, and subject matter, leaning on Renaissance masters like Titian and da Vinci for stylistic inspiration.

Though his work is influenced by ’60s and ’70s motor culture, the visual cues are from a different period altogether, removing the viewer from a particular place in time. It’s modern yet remains steeped in familiar stylistic tropes, enabling it to transcend its timestamp.
In the chiaroscuro of Gunk, the vintage Harley-Davidson can feels as though it could have been produced by a time traveler from the 1500s; the cockeyed drift of the flat trackers in Triumph could have been circling the Colosseum in Rome on their fire-breathing iron steeds.
With his creative use of brush techniques and the way he plays with an object’s transparency and surrounding space, Sures has formulated a unique recipe. His subjects seem to exist in multiple times and places; they’re as much a part of the space that surrounds them as they are solid objects, as if everything is just the space between the atoms.
Sures is showing us that they just may be one and the same, just as the precious metals that we excavate from the earth and transform into motorcycles are made from the same stuff as our flesh and blood.

Though Sures’ pieces tend toward less complicated compositions and feel a bit more focused than something like the Sistine Chapel, it’s easy to imagine that if Michelangelo had the opportunity to revere the internal combustion engine, works like these would have been the result.
This article first appeared in issue 26 of Iron & Air Magazine, and is reproduced here under license
Words by Gregory George Moore | Art by Hans Sures | hanssuresstudio.com | @hanssuresstudio
The selected works depicted here are the property of Hans Sures Studio, including Triumph, Untitled I, Ajax Steel One, Gunk and Drill for Simon. 


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