The language of ugly aesthetics: from Leonardo's sketchbook to contemporary madness

By Gustav De Gaacz

We often think of Leonardo da Vinci as the master of ideal beauty: the balance of the human body, the calm face of the Mona Lisa, the perfection of mathematical proportion. But in his private notebooks Leonardo also drew the grotesque: toothless old men, deformed figures, angular faces with a fascinating, deliberate ugliness. This other side of his genius reveals an interest in the deviant, the marginalized, the exaggerated – that which escapes classical harmony. It was not just satire: in these grotesque studies Leonardo sought the invisible laws of human expression, the mechanisms of laughter, the intrusion of reality into the ideal.

My series "The Mad, It's the Others!" revives this Leonardian impulse, but places it in a mental landscape that oscillates between digital distortion, theatrical absurdity and symbolic surrealism. The central figure in this image, with his spiky crown and his face tense in an expression between surprise and madness, is a direct heir to Leonardo's grotesque portrait. But here ugliness becomes a crown, a confirmation: the madman is no longer the other that society rejects, but the one who reveals the absurdity of reason.

The floating creatures, the inflated faces, the impossible landscapes – all respond to an aesthetic in which ugliness acts as a mirror for our rationality. Like Leonardo, I see ugliness not as a flaw, but as a language. In an era when the image is flooded with artificial perfection, this series offers a more uncomfortable, more visceral, more human beauty.

Because if the crazy one is the other... then who is really sane?