My city Painting

"My city" is an inverted-perspective view of the city. We see all the traffic being clogged and sealed off by policemen, who are opening the way for a big black limousine to zoom by, escorted by police vehicles and an ambulance... People are sitting on the bench at the bus station, stuck, unimpressed, uninterested... The city streets are filled with cars, overflowing garbage bins, and characters who appear to be each in their own bubble, seemingly unaware of each other: the graffiti writer tagging the walls in broad daylight, the nerd on his electric scooter, etc. The main character is hidden in plain sight, under an umbrella at the top of the building, chilling and having a beer, above all the noise and commotion below. This is his domain, "the heavens" (a graffiti term for the highest places to tag), where he is king. My “Blockheads” cycle is inspired by the urban environment and the visual style of street-art culture. It comprises painted wooden-beam sculptures and large-format acrylic paintings with two-dimensional characters that fulfill their individual block of space in their own “mentally limited” way. In the Blockhead acrylic paintings, I approximate street-art murals inspired by urban life: larger-scale compositions with the Blockhead characters in various urban settings. These are all images, scenes, and characters from our everyday city lives and our contemporary popular culture, by which I attempt to portray the current society we are living in—analogously to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, or James Ensor, who all played with the grotesque, thus offering their critical commentary about the life and people of their own time. My portraits are stylistically very different, of course, since I was brought up with video games, comic books, animation, graffiti, and street art.