Limbs hang flaccid, spanning 7 feet in length. Heads twist 180 degrees, multiplying with every bat of an eye lid. Faces skew, rapidly distorting and returning back to their mundane forms. Enter the world of digital artist Thanyy and his elastic alter-ego. Spawned from an unusual relationship with his ‘alien-like’ teenage body, the digital character of Thanyy was born, stretching and morphing out of photographs like molten clay. Now working under his character’s name, Italian born image-maker Thanyy exists and creates within the surreal realms of his images, stretching the boundaries between the real and the imaginary like his tensile limbs. Pushing ideologies of beauty to the extreme through image manipulation, his work aims to expose viewer’s minds to the infinite possibilities of his body, transporting you to the grotesquely magnificent depths of his imagination.

What first prompted your interest in self-manipulation within your work?
I've always been interested in using my own body as a primitive object to produce art. But I always had a strange relationship with it. When I was in middle school I hated it because I used to get bullied about it, I thought I was too skinny, almost like an insect or an alien. In high school I started drawing crazy mutant creatures, with long necks, creepy skinny hands, long legs, arms and big teeth. Now I translate into reality those exaggerate features.

What does your artistic process involve, from research to capturing and editing your images?
5% Researching for inspiration and reference. 25% Thinking and sketching my ideas. 10% Shooting. 60% Post Production aka hours and hours on photoshop.

Your ongoing series of self-portraits sees you stretch, bend, morph and transform your body into the weird and wonderful. Who are the people in your images? Are these different versions of yourself, imaginary characters, fantastical creatures…
Thanyy is my elastic and eclectic online character that I created to bring my ideas to life. His purpose is to fulfill/accomplish my experimentations. I can manipulate his body and the perception of it like an artisan does with clay.

Growing up in Italy, have your surroundings impacted the use of your work as an outlet for self-expression or escapism?
I don't know, I'm not an environmental psychologist, but probably my work is meant to express my creativity, not only my own surroundings. I've always loved to design and build different worlds populated by bizarre creatures.

For your series Will you tie my shoes? you moved from self-portraiture to focussing on female characters, set against the backdrop of a surreal countryside. What was the story behind these images? How did the experience of creating characters based on other people differ to creating your own?
"No one remembers which one was the mother and which one was the daughter. The day they came into this world, rumors were spread about a weird medical case: a mother gave birth to a child who gave birth to another child. It looked like God's twisted joke, a perverted matryoshka doll. The cold case was covered up and everyone saw it as a common twin birth. However, the two girls were never sisters. They lived and died together, always protecting the mistery of that impossibile kinship." This is the story behind this series that my dear friend @n3ttuno wrote. I chose to feature female characters just because I wanted to try something new, for once different from me. Moreover, when you think of a photo with an external point of view, you realize things that otherwise you wouldn't notice.

What artists have particularly inspired and influenced your field of work?
Artists on social media definitely play a role in inspiring me. I love the works of Nadia Lee Cohen, Salvia and Filip Custic. I also think that my interests in my teenage years helped me a lot in shaping my aesthetic. For instance, was totally creeped out, but at the same time attracted by alien/mutant movies, like "The Thing" by John Carpenter. Of course I was in love with Tim Burton and his Edward Scissorhands. Speaking of painters then, René Magritte and Salvador Dali with their surreal and oniric scenarios, did impress me quite a lot.

From the depths of your imagination, what fantasy future world would you like to see for 2020 and beyond? And what possibilities will this hold for future work?
My only resolution for the future and for this 2020 is doing less self portraits, because I'm getting really bored. I'm looking forward to involving new people/models/other artists in projects that aren't necessarily still images. Stay tuned.