Starting the month in Madrid….
PROJECT: EL ÁGUILA:
During the first week of the month, my team and I traveled to Madrid to make an advertising canvas with spray paint for the beer brand EL ÁGUILA. We stayed for around 8 days during which there was rain, snow and a lot of wind which made us have to stop for a few hours and even a few days. In itself, the work was simple, the design was made by the illustrator Carlota Pereiro, who together with other artists created various images for the brand’s promotional glasses, in turn, several canvases with some of these designs were printed and placed on other cities in Spain, but it has been in Madrid, the only city where it was decided to go for a more artistic approach and offer the possibility of seeing how the design was created little by little.
The canvas and all the management of this project was carried out by SOPORTES Y MEDIANERAS, a company especially dedicated to outdoor advertising, with whom I had the pleasure of working on another project last year, that of the Lord of the Rings (See project) .
Although this has been a different project from the ones I usually do since in general terms what I paint I also usually design from scratch, it has been interesting to replicate the lines and concepts of another person, the things it represents and the way of carrying it out.
VISITING MADRID:
Now, on the days that we couldn’t work, we decided to take a tour of Madrid, a city where I have been on very rare occasions and always for work, which gives me little room to make a proper visit. What stands out the most is being able to see the restoration of the signature of MUELLE (1965-1995), considered the first Spanish graffiti writer. The firm is located on Calle de la Montera 30, it was built in 1988 and restored in 2017 by the Madrid City Council after many requests partly driven by the restorer Elena Gayo and the historian Fernando Figueroa so that its legacy was preserved. I also had the opportunity to visit an old Arcade room in the same square where we painted the canvas (Plaza de la Luna) with my friend Pako, who is a fan of old video games and knows absolutely all of them, so going with him and playing for the first time with an expert was extremely fun and rewarding.
RETURNING TO SABADELL… WHAT ABOUT TREZE?
Now, it is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow talking about the conservation of the muelle’s signature, the same month in which two of Treze’s murals come down. For those who do not know, Treze was a writer and graffiti artist born in Sabadell but who quickly became a reference for many, his style and the ease with which he painted denoted a great talent that led him to be invited to several projects. around the world and to be an active part of the growth and support of graffiti in his hometown. Treze was also my partner, unfortunately he passed away in 2018 at the age of 31 due to cancer and since then both his family and I and other entities have been requesting the Sabadell City Council the protection and restoration of his works on the city’s municipal walls; said proposal, formally presented by LA CRIDA and approved during a plenary session in 2021 still does not take off. In 2022 I organized a collection of signatures that were delivered to the culture department and 2 budgets were presented with 2 different actions to address the problem, to this day the City Council remains silent, it being ironic that this year it is proclaimed as capital of Catalan culture194 / 5.000 Resultados de traducción Resultado de traducción , but without even ruling on the possibilities of preserving the work of this person who, even today 6 years after his death, continues to echo in the city and in the world.
I leave some links in case anyone wants to go deeper:
And to finish, the last thing I wanted to highlight this month (outside of the pieces that I have been making out there and that you can see on Instagram), it is this work that I did to B-murals as part of an extension of a project for the shops in the Turó de la Peira neighborhood (Barcelona), more specifically in the Cadí street, where I had the opportunity to make 2 small representative illustrations of 2 businesses on this street; 1 of them, Calçats Cadí , a family business that is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, on the entire street and in counterpoint a bakery that opened the premises the same week that it went to paint the shutter and to which I give my best wishes for it to prosper 🙂 . A peculiarity of this project is that all the blinds on the street have the same design on the outside made by the same artist, but different artists make the illustration of the corresponding subjects in the center, something that certainly gives a lot of unity to the entire sector. .
It has been a pleasure to relate and condense a little what has happened this month and to be able to tell it to you in this space, much more personal, where I can better express my ideas and what I do apart from the pieces that I publish on social media.
I hope you liked it and…see you next month!