CANDYHEAD SERIES

Candyhead scoops out the thinking mind and restocks it with influencer product, sweet and borrowed. These original paintings are by artist Markus Lewis. Candyhead is one of a four part series of original artworks. Across these four series the materials do the confessing: resin poured thick enough to catch the overhead light like a wet candy shell, acrylic dragged fast and dry so you can clock the speed of the wrist, glitter and crystal pressed in as literal grit rather than sparkle. Nothing here is polite about being looked at. And nothing here is cookie cutter. Artists Markus and Leslie Lewis

4 products

Candyhead is a series about heads full of other people's marketing. Look at what's inside these skulls: not brains, not thoughts, but candy — stacked macarons, jellybeans, cellophane sweets, the whole pastel product line poured in where a person's own ideas used to live. This is the influencer condition rendered literally. Somewhere along the way the thinking got scooped out and replaced with branded content, sponsored opinions, the curated feed — sugar that tastes like a personality and dissolves into nothing. Markus glazes the faces in resin so they gleam like a filtered post, then shows you what that gleam is protecting: a mind that has stopped generating anything of its own and simply holds what it's been fed.
The mouths are where it shows. They're open in every canvas because a candy-filled head has two functions — swallow the branding, then repeat it — and the mouth does both. Nothing original comes out of these figures. What goes in as product comes back out as product, bright and sweet and borrowed. The horror of the series, if you sit with it, is how pretty it all looks. That's the point. The prettiness is exactly what made the emptying-out feel like an upgrade.