PAELLA?

BIOGRAPHY

From “Paella Chimicos” (1985-1999) to “PAELLA?” (2000 -…)

Paella is a painter-poster artist of Spanish origin born in 1962, he works in Paris.

Harnessed with a training in graphic design, a degree in Fine Arts and a degree in Fine Arts, he embarked on the pictorial adventure of the 80’s – “Paella Chimicos” his artistic scene name is taken from the anagram of his name and surname – brandishing the banner of a “Deliberate Figuration”. Urban activist of the 1st generation its posters full of humor – silkscreened like those of 68 – line the gutters, animating spiral heads characters. His untimely interventions in the city or the metro continue to be outside the revenue and fashion of Street-Art. Since the year 2000 he signs “PAELLA?” a work where images and texts are telescoping and styles multiply in a will to resist the consumption of standardized images.
The figurative tool that the artist has fashioned is used to question both the play of the work itself and an allusive representation of the contemporary human comedy. Systematically a sentence, an aphoristic formula comes to rest on his painted images, forcing the reading of two registers – each often offering double-meaning, or even more! – taking pleasure in an equivocality that is multiplied. Also Paella has the simultaneous requirement of the background and the form – of the signifier and the signified – as much as he is concerned to question the very means of his expression by obliging himself not to settle down in a stylistic way and therefore to change perpetually in order to consider his work: from Expressionism to graphic sobriety, including the rehearsals of the great masters or some of the emblematic works of the History of Art. His obstinacy in sticking to the 80’s of the satyrico-politico-advertising posters earned him to be considered as one of the first actors of the urban movement today labeled “Street-Art”, his main ambition
being to perpetuate free political expression in the lineage of the May 68 images.
About thirty years of research as he likes to describe the progress of his work, and more than 120 solo exhibitions in France and abroad to his credit, the little guy with a spiral head has not finished smiling at us .

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