Art must constantly disappear from public space, thus changing public space and enhancing people’s feelings. I want to fill this place with color and anger, and I am eager to see people no longer walk to the outline, but not forget to enjoy the surrounding scenery while moving forward. In this way, you are interested in living.
If I first saw Okuda San Miguel’s China’s first large-scale solo exhibition “Fantasy of kaos” in chi K11 art space in Guangzhou, I seemed to disagree with his familiarity with the aesthetics of street art. This famous contemporary artist in Spain used strong and bright rainbow colors to create a unique and harmonious style, burdening all the walls and floors as far as the eye can see with overwhelming downwind, trying to make the audience feel that they have been accepted into the products from the moment they stepped into the exhibition hall, and establish a connection and resonance of a certain color with sinking feelings.
Panoramic street perspective, brightly colored animal sculptures and several constructions with smooth lines make me feel that Miguel is a world-famous surreal wave spectrum street graffiti and public sculpture artist.
In recent years, after Miguel transformed an abandoned Spanish church into “Kaos Temple” in skatepark, he created 11Mirages to the Freedom in Youssoufia, a Moroccan town. He set his seat on the outer wall of an abandoned church in this metropolis and surrounded it with colorful colors and patterns. There are 11 holes in the wall, and the windows of the original structure are abandoned and donated on people’s heads, just like a fence, and people in it are like birds tied in cages. All the patterns and colors are perfectly combined with the architecture, which reduces the brand-new maturity of the architecture that will be forgotten.
However, Miguel, like a fool with a palette, shows the colorful street graffiti art. At first glance, it looks like the fun-loving and hip-hop humor that fashionable fashion brands have always emphasized, but slowly grasping the quality can make people grasp countless details and chew slowly.
First of all, Miguel’s products are full of life and hope to see them. He combined gray and color, with a strong spectral civilization and surrealism. In his paintings, there are often no birds, stars, naked women, skulls and dots, with gray as the base and then laid with colored triangles. This form of painting seems dull, but in fact it is full of colors in sequence. Combining different patterns with gray in organic form represents the confrontation between wild and nature. When Miguel uses these colorful patterns to draw people or other heads, he is actually trying to include all races and nations-all skin colors and civilizations, integrated into a pluralistic and inclusive world.
In addition, although many of Miguel’s works are gorgeous and beautiful, colorful and calm, they make the audience feel alert and thoughtful. Is it because these products show the natural environment outside the city or human samples with bird noses? Or is it because all the central authorities have used a balanced aesthetic treatment to punish? From skulls, Venus, horses, birds to beaches, oceans, forests and towns, all these creations are intimate, at the same time convincing and considered.
For example, in the masterpiece “Lake of Desire”, Miguel’s image depicts the contemporary feeling of this kind of human desire to see exile in nature. In this work, Miss with a bird’s pointed nose leans on the red, white and green swimming ring, and another bird gets out of the underground cave and uses a long pointed beak similar to Miss’s to grab food. It reminds us that human beings, like animals, are running, plundering and demanding the natural environment. Although the solemn nature is awe-inspiring, our wishes have invaded the most distant places.
Miguel’s works show the exaggerated gap of our desire to see, and what we see is just our own bizarre situation. This is the source of our deep meditation when we watch Miguel’s works, and it is also the wonderful philosophical thinking that we can perhaps capture when we walk between the city and nature.
Obviously, Miguel’s works are concerned with the contradiction of professionalism, the meaning of maturity and the false freedom created by the capitalist track, and he is rooted in the contradiction of modern human origin. He is full of endless interest in various forms of spectrum art, especially in the innovation of movies and fashion fields, and he is also curious about the national civilizations of other regions, which enables him to perhaps integrate these interesting elements into his personal creation.
In the masterpiece “Drawing Venus in the Sky”, we see a 3D Venus holding a kaleidoscope standing abstractly in the middle of the exhibition hall, and it seems that a wonderful spectrum which is a metaphor for the world of human imagination has disappeared from her hands. Like a hurricane, the great magic of the art world confronts the small and mysterious human individuals in the works. Creating tension between macro and macro is the operating principle of his products. Make a constant performance, these people are both individuals with their own significance and single actors in the dream of globalization.
Although many of Miguel’s works show the innovative picture of globalization on human society, the artist didn’t just forget these signs. What he sought was to ask questions for the creator, just like interviewing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, exploring the forbidden cause of being stolen, and pondering what modern civilization did to the world and human beings.
Then, how will artists really show their surreal feelings of familiarity with reality and reality? Miguel specially created a multimedia installation “Kaleidoscope Tunnel” for this exhibition. A small world of flowers and flowers is hidden in the multi-point prism area where the exhibition hall is equipped, and the audience may be able to walk into the fairyland that feels like a peach blossom garden.
What’s more fascinating is that there is another VR special program “kaos Carnival” at the exhibition site, which is a playful program with a feeling time of about 5 minutes. The audience needs to follow the instructions of the tour guide to add to the catalogue, mainly following the simulation of music and visual running and dancing, and running for continuous exploration and innovation in the outer space of the universe.
In fact, for Miguel, the creative process is rational and conscious. During this period, he explored and realized concepts and ideas through visual expression, and also used the subconscious ideas of every artistic work during its growth. When he created a unique surreal and metaphorical universe, Miguel was interested in the verbal space connecting us with dreams and imagination. They gradually form a natural or induced subconscious state, which makes us enter the unexpected field of creativity and clarify the most surreal point. This is why in this exhibition, the elements of works we can see have ever-changing eyes. This is a form of expression that transforms the spiritual concept into visual feelings, and has always worked in various artistic works of artists.
Okuda San Miguel’s “kaos Fantasy” exhibition site
Guangzhou K11 Art Gallery Bridge Universe Gallery, 2020 thanks to the artist.
“Art must constantly disappear from public space, thus changing public space and enhancing people’s feelings. I want to fill this place with color and anger, and I am eager to see people no longer walk to the outline, but not forget to enjoy the surrounding scenery while moving forward. In this way, you are interested in living. ” The artist Okuda San Miguel said.
Based on surrealism, inspired by ancient civilization, and combined with contemporary graphics, Miguel created a 25-meter-high street installation called “Cosmic Balance” for the Spanish Conservative Water Festival.
Just as the surreal spectrum is between popular art and mainstream civilization, pure art and folk art, Miguel’s creations strive to make popular civilization and street graffiti art enter the mainstream art circle and the public space of society, and bring his self-casual, but serious creative spirit, easel painting and sculpture, installation products to the price of secular civilization and universal emotion into every margin of our familiar life and residence, just like a god reminding us that what human beings can really do is to constantly meditate and change.