"...Mambo!" Painting

Artist Statement

I think we are living in an illusion, but sometimes we are “touched” from the other side of the veil by the “real reality”, the one that cannot be seen.
Arts -when they achieve it- open some of those magic gates that help us get across the veil, offering a glimpse to the other side via some kind of "poetic event".

I work on it to contribute my two cents to help "bringing Heaven to Earth".

This specific proposal, working with Ink and Watercolours on Japanese paper, started in 2014, feeling like a good story about to unfold.
It’s an exploration across Drawing -without a previous drawing, Painting -in a different way- and partly a certain awareness of the brush strokes as in oriental Calligraphy.

A Minor Art. With capital letters.

Medium

I use Japanese "washi". The best Japanese papers are those which are made by hand and are produced during the winter months when snow is available for whitening the fibres naturally and the cold water keeps the fibres tight and compact during the sheet formation.

For setting the paintings and being easy to display, preserve and collect, this material is inseparable from mounting.
Due to that this paintings are mainly executed on Kitakata Paper (gampi fibres) which is soft and thin.

There are two main ways of mounting: dry and wet.
I mounted my early images onto cartridge paper using a dry hot press tissue, but now I use the traditional wet mounting technique on Kosuke paper.
Conservation PH is taken into account along the whole process.
All my work here is “archival quality”.


Short biography

Marcel Garbi is a Spanish multi-disciplinary artist born in Buenos Aires with a London heart. He lives and works in London since 2009.

His main professional artistic fields have been, in different periods: Illustration, Musical Composition, Digital Audio-Visual media and Painting. Other artistic explorations along his life include Theatre, Film-making, Animation, Graphic Design, Photography and Sound Design.

The Illustration period spans for a bit more than a decade mainly in Barcelona during the 80s represented by “Safia” working for the biggest names in Advertising & Editorial (Mc Cann Erickson, J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Playboy, Haymarket, Philips, Merck, Abbot, Hornimans, Kraft, etc.) making above all commissioned hyper-realistic airbrushed work and some pastiches.

The Music Composition/Sound design period occupied also about ten years but this time that happened in Madrid.