Category: ARTISTS

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Oton

Self-taught and self-trained, Oton always has a passion for painting and drawing since childhood age, particularly keen on depicting scenes related to Madrid. Without stopping painting,  he completed high school and then completed his training specializing in graphic design. With no desire to abandon his permanent dedication to painting, from a very young age he has worked in the hostelry business, doing diverse jobs such as waiter, cook, etc. A few years later he carried out various graphic design projects as a creative in the advertising field. After many years of effort, Oton eventually can dedicate himself full-time to his painting, something that he has been fighting for all his life. 

In 2005, Oton opened his first individual exhibition. He painted on board and paper, where he started with painting, then followed with a processual and iconic repertoire of collages: fragments of magazines, glued to the support, are intermingled with the painting and dialogue with certain aspects of neo-dadaism, abstract expressionism, or pop-art. This first stage of Oton’s works led him to focus more on the images.

It was when Oton made collections of collages. He created more than 600 works in small format, completely excluding painting. He wanted to create conceptual works that question us about our relationship with the images of the mass media and the world of art, something that has a language of its own, critical and ironic, where humor ends up unifying the discourse, and where the smile, often present, becomes a grimace.

After some time looking away, by chance, what Oton seeks appeared from the hands of his 2-year-old nephew. With him, Oton spent time drawing and coloring children’s notebooks. It is then, Otonobserved how he had fun crossing out, blurring, or scribbling a smile on Mickey Mouse, Goofy, etc., where he realises that there is something crucial and interesting.

This is how his process begins. A playful job. A pure and innocent drawing. Where there are no rules and everything is put at the same level. A hand, an eye, a breast, an ass or a cock, they are the same. “I just draw. I give them attributes, and in the end it almost seems that they are the ones who are drawing themselves, laughing at themselves.”

It is also a fresh and spontaneous look at the sweetened and consumerist world with Disney’s signatures. They are iconic symbols of popular culture, parodied in a vulgar and scathing way, making them ironic and mocking images that make you smile. A critical look, once again asking us about our relationship with Fanzine iconography. Oton is interested in the line, the blot, the blur, the error. As necessary as the success.

As a result, gestural impulses on paper, created by using pencils, crayons, pastels, etc., enrich a lucid and acid work that does not leave you indifferent. Antics on paper, where ingenuity and irreverence are embodied with plasticity and naturalness, in a crazy and fun work.In short, it’s a child’s game.

 

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Miguel Angel Funez

Miguel Angel Funez has a degree in Fine Arts and holds a Master’s degree in Art and Creative Studies with distinction from the Universidad Completeness de Madrid. From an early age, he knew that happiness was closely related to art. He has always been interested in the subject of art: everything related to artists and museums has attracted him. The excitement and shock he felt when he first visited the Prado Museum in Madrid as a child is still unforgettable. Every day, he kept drawing, trying to surpass himself.

The various iconographic appropriations and subsequent manipulations based on popular images are the starting point, showing a sample of a diverse reality while being seduced by fiction. A story that not only considers the object of the miracle, but is also subject to admiration and surprise, including instinctive repulsion and disgust. The paintings that make up this series show the contemporary “horror vacuum”, including everything that cannot exist at the time, that exists and that does not exist, that frightens us and seduces us, that belongs to us and delights us, that prompts us to imagine other worlds different from our own.

 

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Max Bi

Max Bi’s inspiration comes mainly from the 1980s, a time of cultural upheaval with global capitalism, mass media, wealth disparity, and unique music typified by electro-pop and hip-hop. In addition, the 1980s were filled with politically pivotal events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the end of the Cold War. Max Bi was more influenced by important street and graffiti artists of the time such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf.

In the early 2000s, Max Bi reproduced the writer’s calligraphic graphics on raw jute canvas using stencils and spray cans, their labels, which resembled the original glyphs, and took his figurative cues from Italian Pop Art iconography . Tribal masks from the Paladino or Basquiat-style graffiti, but reinterpreted in an informal way. A lot of fluorescent colors are used in Max’s works. This kind of color matching is often accompanied by a sense of distance and surrealism. At first glance, it is the sum of bright and colorful, but if you go deeper, you will find that his humorous vocabulary, words and Alternating space-time changes.

Max Bi’s animal series depicts imaginary cityscapes inhabited entirely by animals, where the presence of humans leaves free space for the actions of animals, sharks, wolves and many other animals are the only protagonists in the narrative, carefully Look at these animals all have anthropomorphic features and stand in the foreground with irregular bright color elements superimposed. In these works, animals and humans switch roles, with the former inhabiting the latter, giving life to the scenes and making the viewer wonder whether these cities represent freedom or a cage. Max Bi’s artistic language is the result of 20 years of figurative research, in which the artist experimented with a mixture of languages ​​and various expressive techniques. The result of this constant search for novelty and variation led him to draw unambiguous inspiration from the pictorial panorama of Italian Pop Art, such as Palladino’s tribal masks or Basquiat’s graffiti.

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Zino

Zino, stage name of Luigi Franchi, was born in Teramo in 1973. During the 90’s he studied art history at the University of Bologna, graduating with a thesis on Francis Bacon and started attending the contemporary art world collaborating with some artists from the “ex-pastificio Cerere” in Rome.

At the end of the millennium, he contributed to the realization of some installations for international artistic events (Fuori uso, Trasalimenti) before embarking on a parallel path in the restoration of works of art, graduating in 2003 at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence.For over 15 years he has been active in the recovery and preservation of the Italian artistic heritage, specializing in the restoration of paintings and frescoes from the Renaissance to the Baroque.Since 2008 he has been teaching History of Art in high schools.In 2014 he collaborated with the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila teaching the course “History of restoration”.Since 2017 he has been living and working in Rimini where he teaches, cuts, glues, writes, plays and takes part in the cultural life of the city.Zino has exhibited at various public institutions, galleries and art fairs. (Camec La Spezia, Pino Pascali Polignano a Mare Foundation, Carrara Plastic Arts Center, Liquid art Capri, Gallery 1opera Naples, Gallery B4 Bologna, Setup art fair Bologna, Galleria Zamagni art Rimini).

Involved and interested in contemporary society, from consumerism to globalization, from pop culture to youth fashions, his journey has been characterized by the use of different materials mostly belonging to non-artistic environments such as Lego bricks, PVC balls, 3D printing.It is the most recent research centred on the image distortion intended as mass-media icon in which a meaning transposition is established, allowing objects and people to accumulate new and different significance when filtered through the net or the television, essentially through an act of image “pixelation”. The images are accurately reproduced on paper but part of their surface is modified through the use of Lego bricks, in a sort of computerised enlargement, causing an interference in the object comprehension which do not prevent its correct reading, but simply marks an invisible line in balance between realisation and complete alteration. The constant search for new formal solutions to talk about today’s society and the curiosity to experiment with different languages to test their expressive potential are the basis of his work.

 

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Lorenzo Anzini

Lorenzo Anzini was born on August 9, 1984 in Rimini and lives and works in Cattolica. Graduated in Graphics at the ISIA in Urbino, at the age of 27 he entered the world of tattooing and redefined it as a means of expression in contemporary visual art. The body is the canvas to be painted and the sculpture to be shaped. A parallel art form that strongly influenced the artist’s pictorial culture. Drawing and tattoo art are symbiotic expressive languages. These interplaying pollutions produce canvases that stand out in comparison to tattoos, a monumental art that can be displayed forever.

His style is the result of a unique vision and of a sometimes provocative attitude that deconstructs the world around it through intense color and the power of direct communication. His art is the amalgamation of two professions that merge and break a strongly artistic urban idiom between the abstract world and the real world. Passion for art in all its forms embodies a defined, sometimes acerbic style that flows between content and sign, flowing into a poetics of the unconventional and free.

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Fabio Viale

Fabio uses the traditional but classic medium—marble, to reflect on contemporary thoughts and behaviors, and from the perspective of art history, especially Italian sculpture history, to explore how past classic works are constructed and continue to influence human belief and ideal symbol. His profound carving skills allow the hard medium of marble to accurately represent everyday objects and figures, just like the texture of paper, rubber or tattooed skin.

Two different visual cultures coexist in Fabio’s works: one is the aesthetics of Western art history and the spirit of flawless creation, and the other is the traditional Japanese technique of tattoo art. However, the artist deliberately treated the material of the sculpture like foam plastic, shaping it with this texture and deliberate flaws. The unreality of the sculpture not only reminds people of highly commercialized religious icons, but also mocks the commodity under Marxism. worship. In addition, his precise handling of detail and materials is the best interpretation of these powerful symbols and re-contextualization of everyday objects, and the irony generated by his clever appropriation and manipulation is what makes these sculptures truly unique and thought-provoking. 

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Edoardo Cialfi

Edoardo Cialfi studied at the Alpinolo Magnini Academy of Art and then obtained a First Class Academic Diploma in Painting and Visual Arts at the LABA in Florence. Currently studying a two-year specialization in Art-Cultural Mediation in Painting Studio Direction at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona.

His art started in 2008, when he started using the aerosol medium, and in 2012 he started doing street art groups. In an academic setting, however, he decided to move his research away from walls to more traditional flat surfaces such as canvas, wood or cardboard. He began working on a reinterpretation of archetypal pictorial languages, especially the genre of landscape painting, but maintaining a strong connection to his origins, creating his aerosol works. In the works presented this time, on the one hand, the urban countryside shrouded in smog is printed on canvas with spray cans and oil paint; on the other hand, the tangible and three-dimensional structure is between photography and sculpture.

His reinterpretation of landscapes is more than an aesthetic manipulation. He tried to use two fields to express two different concepts: fog and storm. Fog is the medium through which he attempts to represent the isolation and insecurity that characterizes contemporary man. Storm, on the other hand, is his means of trying to express the concept of nature as a threat, an autonomous, impartial entity capable of loathing human existence, and these landscapes are the domains of his birth and life.

 

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Daniele Oldani

Born in Milan in 1979, Daniele Oldani first encountered art at the age of fourteen, including graffiti and painting, thus starting his self-taught artistic career. Daniele Oldani graduated from the Milan Academy of Comics, and worked as a cartoonist and illustrator with a number of publishing houses, including Warner Brothers. Over the years, painting has been with him, and he has also continued to explore various styles and artistic trends, constantly looking for his own identity.

In Daniele’s works, “mirror writing” is a characteristic that can be seen at first sight. He randomly writes in the opposite direction of the text, so as to obtain the mirror image of the normal text. The modern common usage of mirrored writing can be found on the front of an ambulance, as in the word “AMBULANCE” is usually written in a very large mirror image so that the driver sees the word in the correct way in the rearview mirror. Daniele’s work can be displayed with a mirror to get the text in the correct direction, adding interest to the display of the work. Mirror writing is sometimes regarded as an extremely primitive form of code, the viewer can continuously interpret the text in the picture, and then find the clues left by the artist.

 

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Antonio Cugnetto

Born in Lamezia Terme in 1983, after graduating from the Liceo Artistico in Catanzaro, he moved to Florence where he graduated in Contemporary Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence in 2007 and started his personal and critical art studies. His works have participated in auctions many times. During his career, he has participated in many activities and competitions all over Italy, and has emerged in the art market in various art festivals, expositions, and awards.

Curator Carolina Lio once commented on Antoni’s work: His creation is playful but ironic, a stylized little man, as in a children’s cartoon or cartoon, seems at first glance to be part of a childish and carefree scene , yet a second glance at the work reveals the grotesque details of its violence. Antoni’s work reveals the hypocrisy of everyday life, both serious and not-so-serious, often confined to our repressed unspoken intentions or realms of thought. And his choice to represent them in a poor and childish language makes them all the more poignant

 

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Rhys Brown

Rhys Brown is a London based creative that uses his work to harvest happiness from within the feeling of nostalgia and youth. Rhys is known for his relief style squashed plush prints from childhood favorites and oversized huge teddy bear paintings that are reminiscent of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries works.
The nature of his works are produced in a way that makes every print unique from the body movement to the amount of ink applied in a specific area.