IMN #19 — FEWOCiOUS
It's Monday Night #19
Tonight, let’s share thoughts about @fewocious’ work: the invention of a visual language that only he speaks but that we can all understand. He brings together the intimate pulse of a diary and the universal vibration of master painting.
But let me elaborate.
@fewocious belongs to this lineage of artists (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Fauvism, among which Matisse, Picasso, etc.) who draw from the child's drawing not only an expressive intensity, but a naive force of destruction and deformation.
Everyone knows Picasso's famous phrase that he certainly did not say: "It took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child". In a way, @fewocious is one step ahead: he refused to learn to draw like an adult, he chose to never stop drawing like a child. He could have, of course.
The graphic gesture of the child does not seek resemblance to a world of objects, but an immediate adequacy to a sentimental life.
It is not the rational reconstruction of an appearance, but the exploration of inarticulate thoughts and emotions: @fewocious' art is not a sentence translated into paint, it is a scream inside the color. A cry says nothing but allows for instant, brutal, perfect communication.
Colors too bright, rough outlines, visible touches, irregularities, problems of dimensions: it is not clumsiness - a lack of technique - but the search for a perfect harmony between the chaos of feelings and the flow of forms.
The style of @fewocious does not obey any grammar, it develops in contact with what destabilizes it and gives it life.
In his kingdom, it is the painting which is sovereign: imagine a world in which the painting would have taken control, invading the cities, dripping on the faces, twisting the bodies and the souls.
Paint is the magic substance that transforms figures into grimacing masks: everything smiles in @fewocious' universe, but everything makes a face.
Because what interests @fewocious is to leave open the question of whether the phantasmagoria is a dream or a nightmare, a utopia or an uninhabitable world. He forces us to live with the trouble.
All the art of @fewocious stands at the edge of this decisive second where the dream can become a nightmare and vice versa. In fact, he offers us a tightrope walk on the wire that separates one from the other.
@fewocious' work is a portrait gallery. But in his work, the subject of the portrait is not a face or a posture, it is a queer identity that mixes human and inanimate parts, pieces of the world that seem to have landed there by accident and garish colors that assault the eyes.
What @fewocious paints are beings in precarious equilibrium: there is in all his characters the jubilation of metamorphosis and the panic of disappearance.
Each @fewocious work is a bite by an unknown animal. And it bites you with its eyes: huge, wide-open, exorbitant, watery eyes that pierce the face.
@fewocious' work is filled with pleas for love, cries for help, anguish and fear: all that hidden or repressed inner life that overflows and threatens to turn us into monsters.
@fewocious creates a plastic language that deflects the violence of norms and clears the way for multiple, joyful, spiritual, fragile identities.
He reminds us how sacred it is that the body is not sacralized.
It is not a body without organs, it is a body overwhelmed by its own organs, which contains cities, streets, a piece of sky, a multitude - here I would speak of automatic architecture rather than automatic writing.
The space of the face and the personality is transformed by an assembly which follows the unconscious logic of the exquisite corpse. The self gathers its shreds to be reborn from its dispersion and its inner chaos.
The strength of @fewocious' art is to show how the body is a creator of norms. There is nothing inherently normal or abnormal.
He puts in equivalence plasticity of the living & that of the painting in a great poetic ode to the diversity of forms: there is no border between the clean & the dirty, the ugly & the beautiful, the enormous & the small, there are only thresholds, gray zones, transition spaces.
@fewocious does not aim for formal perfection but rather cultivates the form of the trial, the unfinished, the draft.
He leaves an opening in each of his works that appears less as the result of the process than as a moment in the process - a process whose outcome is yet to come, perhaps, later, elsewhere and differently.
It is as if each work bears the trace of a gesture of writing and rewriting: we see the seams, the scars, the erasures, the stacking of layers of symbols, which testify to a painful and explosive birth.
@fewocious' art has matured directly within the digital medium. He masters the tools, which gives him great freedom of tone and form.
At the same time, his creative process is bent in the heart of metropolitan life: there is in fact in his aesthetic (between street art, album covers, magazine front pages, advertisements, comics, etc.) a kind of urban lyricism.
He sings of sentimental crowds and the fragmentation of the world; the gigantism of the big city and the shriveling of its inhabitants; the generalized anonymity and the great mixture of lifestyles.
@fewocious' art gives shape to contradictions and suffering, without giving answers but taking the measure of the enigmas of (post)modern life, identities, feelings & contemporary dilemmas to be oneself.
@fewocious painting is a huge battlefield for not giving in to stupidity. It is engaged. Fewociously.