This week I was invited to visit Espacio SOLO, a place that holds a very special private art collection. In this SOLO collection there’s a deep love for avant-garde art and the will to support young artists. In between the street and the collection, through an elevator, the guest enters another dimension, getting into a “non-space” that offers a first dose of what you’ll find inside the collection. In an initiation ritual, the elevator takes you to an adventure.
Grip Face and His Capsule that Travels in a Limbo
The artist Grip Face intervened an elevator shaft. When he did so, he transformed it, he interacts with the space that, not being either inside or outside, becomes a limbo. Figures transform themselves, from figurative heads to colored spots that evoke forms. The elevator turns into a capsule that travels through a world of colors, shapes and figures that are composing, decomposing and transforming themselves while the elevator goes up or down. We can say that this piece is made of three phases: at first, there are tied heads that look forward and aren’t looking at each other. While we go upwards, the painting changes, the hair and face keep their human identity, but the rest mutates into shapes and colored spots. Watching the piece from up top, the shapes and the plastic volumes give a motion sensation. This way, the language and shapes of Grip Face make themselves less figurative, less recognizable as we ascend. The heads get smaller and smaller, they pile themselves up over one another and transform. In the last phase, we see colored shapes and hairs that give them a human tone, faces that now look at each other with empty looks… What is Grip Face expressing with his art?
Art to Reflect
The artist’s work hooks us; it is visually attractive. Its pastel colors and stimulating forms captivate us and force us to figure out the background of the message encrypted in the language of the Mallorcan artist. Grip’s art is a storytelling art, an art that denounces society’s events that worry him and that invites the spectator to reflect, to tell us what rests in his subconscious, his suffering and his personal growth.
Grip is concerned about many things of our society. The message of his work is raw; it speaks to us about the artist’s nightmares and the nightmares that surround him: the migrant crisis, the treatment that we give to the refugees in Europe, animal cruelty, climate change, plastic pollution of our seas. Ultimately, I’ve especially enjoyed this blog post. I was lucky to meet Grip and see him paint and have him talk to me about his work. “We are more free than ever and, nevertheless, we’ve never been more controlled,” he reflected with me.
Art to Change the World
This week at home we’ve been reflecting about what’s happening in our oceans: the plastic we throw into the sea is polluting everything and this is turning into a threat for sea life. This week’s workshop is going to promote awareness. After reflecting about the state of our seas and thinking about how we can change this situation, we’ll do a collective mural denouncing it. We’ll learn that through our artistic expression we can call to reflection and ask for change. Reflecting, talking about what worries us, denouncing it through our drawings and paintings is therapeutic; I invite you to try this at home.
Photography: Oscar Rivilla
Conceptual Design: Carolina Verd
Fashion courtesy of Pez:
Jumpsuit and sneakers by Golden Goose Deluxe Brand
Pendants by Beatriz Palacios
Carolina Verd 