Ceci n’est pas un perroquet.

I’ll confess I’m not a big fan of body painting. But the creations of South-Tyrolese artist Johannes Stötter are enough to leave you speechless.

Johannes studied philosophy at Innsbruck University; born and raised in a family of musicians, he plays the violin and the bozouki in a Celtic folk band. A self-taught artist, he began to develop his artistic skills without taking much inspiration from previous painters: therefore his style was formed, little by little, in a very original fashion.

After officially entering the body-painting community by partecipating to the World Bodypainting Festival in Austria in 2009, he became a worldwide sensation in 2013 thanks to his tropical frog composed with five human painted bodies.
From there on, Johannes’ carreer has known a growing success. Today he’s a teacher at the World Bodypainting Academy and at Yoni Academy.

His best creations are camouflages, and his talent resides in concealing and hiding, rather than exalting, the shape of the human body. Johannes Stötter’s subjects undergo a metamorphosis, and thanks to the use of color their presence is tranfigured or reconfigured. They might disappear completely, fusing with their environment, or give rise to optical illusions that are almost impossible to discern at first sight.

What’s more common and well-known than a woman’s or a man’s body? And yet Stötter’s painting – a real instrument of wonder – succeeds in making us admire it in a different way, showing it as a part of nature. Almost as if our own skin was not actually a barrier, a boundary with the outside world, but a point of contact fusing us with the wonder of everything.

Here’s Johannes Stötter‘s official website.