A. L. Crego
A. L. Crego is without a doubt a 21st century digital art revolutionary. His innovative gif artworks blend the physical and digital realms of art, providing mesmeric visuals, with perfect loops, that pull you in and make you think deeply.
This fresh approach to gif-art as an artistic genre has captured the attention of patrons and publications across the world. Despite intentionally staying away from social media, he’s managed to achieve internet virality. His artwork has been a constant topic of discussion on Vice, as well as ArchDaily and BoredPanda. His artworks have been exhibited across the globe and he’s done commissioned work for Vice, Nissan, Espolon, Perrier, international newspapers, and art blogs.
To stop is to advance by A. L. Crego
In The News
- A.L. Crego Transforms 20 Murals into Animated GIFS
- GIFs That Bring Street Art to Life
- Artists’ First GIFs | GIF Six-Pack
- El rey del gif-art es gallego
Notable Sales
A. L. Crego is one of MakersPlace’s pioneering artists whose artworks have been highly coveted since early on and are now undeniably even more so. Past sales of 1/1 artworks from last year (2020) have consistently ranged from $1,216 – $2,827. His artworks on average have sold for +160% price increase on the secondary market.
Digital Public Space: Bringing The Streets To The Screen
A. L. Crego teams up with a number of renowned street artists from around the world to bring his pioneering GIF art experiences from the screen to the streets and back again. The works of international street artists SOKRAM, LIDIA CAO, MØU, ARYZ, PHLEGM and FAITH47 are brought to life through the mesmerizing GIF magic of A. L. Crego, making for the first ever digital murals to bless the blockchain.
Sokram
Sokram is a multidisciplinary creative: Design, illustration and muralism are his main focuses, in addition to his role as curator and organizer of several urban art festivals (by Mutante Creativo, his creative studio among his colleague Møu). Some examples are Rexenera Fest and their own street art festival DesOrdes Creativas, one of the pioneers of the street art scene.
His work in the public space varies in terms of message, concept and form according to the setting. His consistent intention is to utilize the environment where the piece is and take advantage of the format of the wall, object or the building to raise the final composition.
His works are spread over the world in places such Spain, Italy, France, U.K, Portugal or Indonesia.
Entropies & Dystopias. – Carballo, Spain, 2020.
Photo: A. L. Crego.
Sokram x A. L. Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
LIDIA CAO
From a very young age, Lidia Cao has been interested in drawing, specializing in the treatment of figures and faces, carefully analyzing expressions to achieve “a lot with a little”.
In her artwork, the characters hold the primary weight in the composition and the dreamlike atmospheres she generates enhance the expressiveness of her faces, which function as intimate psychological portraits and acquires a veiled but intense dramaturgy.
Her mastery of volume is highlighted through firm lines, her taste for synthesis in her color palettes and her attraction to desaturated and slightly strident ranges, pondering the importance of drawing over color. In 2016 street art crossed her path, and since that moment her career as an illustrator was combined with her mural work, which was gained more and more weight, leading to her participation
in various global street art events in recent years.
Weaving the revolution – Ordes, Spain, 2018
Photo: A. L. Crego.
Lidia Cao x A. L. Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
MØU
Møu is an multidisciplinary artist whose practice is centered around graphic design, music and muralism, in addition to his role as co-director and curator for Mutante Creativo (his studio with his partner
Sokram) on street art events such as the Rexenera Fest and the pioneer festival of the European scene, DesOrdes Creativas.
He is formally trained in graphic design which has strongly influenced his work, creating a style in which a low key palette dominates and plays up volumes through plain shapes, Everything is sustained with a
constant and clean line. His walls adapt the environment drinking from his own personal history and stories.
Liberi – Santiago de Compostela, Spain. 2019.
Photo: Mou.
Møu x A. L. Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
Aryz
Aryz is known for his large-scale murals. Generally, his murals depict humans or animals in a combination of surreal and muted muted color palettes. Bones are a recurring motif in the artist’s work with characters
revealing their entrails, organs or bones.
Regardless of its definition, Aryz enjoys using classic street art tools such as brushes, spray paint, rollers, and more. His preferred painting setting is in abandoned factories because people avoid bothering him there. These factories often offer a perfect location due to their huge walls and varied surfaces. Aryz attributes his skill as a painter to his learning and practice with aerosol mediums because that was the method that he used primarily to develop his style.
Shamisen – Tokyo, Japan, 2019.
Photo: Aryz.
Aryz x A. L. Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
Phlegm
Phlegm creates surreal illustrations to reveal untold stories, weaving a visual narrative that explores the fantastical realm through creatures from his imagination. His artwork is deeply tied to urban landscapee, and can mostly be seen in run-down and disused spaces.
Phlegm’s storybook-like imagery is half childlike, half menacing, set in built up cityscapes with castles, turrets and winding stairways. At other times the city itself is the literal setting for his long limbed half-human, half-woodland creatures.
In Phlegm’s dream world viewers come across impossible flying machines and complex networks of levers, pulleys and cogs, set beside telescopes, magnifying glasses and zephyrs. Working mostly in monochrome, his fine technique and intricate detail can be
seen as a curiosity cabinet of the mind. Each drawing forms part of a grand narrative that extends worldwide, in countries including Norway, Canada, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, USA, Belgium, Poland,
Italy, Slovakia, Spain and Australia. His work has also appeared on a variety of objects such as airplanes, boats, buildings, vehicles and in many global street art festivals.
Rabat, Morocco, 2019.
Photo: Phlegm.
Phlegm x A. L. Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
Faith47
Liberty Du, who is widely recognized as Faith XLVII, is a South African Multi-Disciplinary Artist. Her journey into art began on the streets of South Africa in 1997, as a young graffiti writer taking on the name Faith47 (the number being a reference to her grandmothers numerological theorem).
In 2006, Liberty began on a nomadic journey which has brought her to create works in 39 countries. Her evolution from street artist to a multi-disciplinary creator has created a fluid yet solid bridge into the contemporary art world. This explorative approach has led her to develop a broad range of artwork, ranging from immersive new media installations, hand-sewn wall tapestries, to sculptural bronze works investigating hierarchies of power, paintings, and various explorations into printmaking.
Today, her artwork can be found in the several private and public collections including: Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Lighthouse Properties in Philadelphia and the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation in South Africa. She has shown at the Calais Museum of Fine Art and the Bernard Magrez Foundation in France, Mana Contemporary and the Brooklyn Museum, both in the USA.
Harlem, USA, 2015.
Photo: Faith47.
Faith47 x A.L Crego
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
Humanimal – Urban
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
Artist Statement by A. L. Crego
On the way to space and public art I came across the digital walls.
They can be “painted” but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of
separating…
A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the
internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts surrounding
the world of art and more specifically urban art or public art.
From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of
being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free
from any premise or institution when it is created (not considering the “warlike
coexistence” with the advertising).
The emergence of the Internet has changed how we interact with art. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, which brings up questions of whether the street is the only natural canvas of this specific art discipline.
While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at
it.Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no
longer just plastic. Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is
inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a
tool, a method of creation or of dissemination.
But at the same time, centuries of art history have conditioned the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is. The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world.
Both virtual and augmented reality are rooted in reality, but the fact that one is appreciated
through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even
real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does
not provide the complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it
was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an
intermediary.
Yet at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today
with these devices – movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and
classic – and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.
At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic
expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in
the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital
space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of “existing” first in the ‘real reality’
to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have
an impact on the analog reality.
It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art,
since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or
appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity,
always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of
infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using
copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by
the “erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it
is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that
everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous” characters or the
concept of “famonimity”; people or artists who are known precisely because they are
anonymous.
Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself
freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder
of the space divided by the private, the “leftovers” after the developers pass, the
worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc.
With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a
public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been.
Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone,
that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art
would no longer have that sense.
Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone,
free of charge and without any kind of condition, I believe that digital art fulfills this
role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs
this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art
is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which
makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time.
And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in
the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside
them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass
through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public
space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a
company or simply, the property of an individual.
Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is
always subject to something superior that manages it. Within this dilemma, augmented
reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of
creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as
the piece’s canvas.
Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with
this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming
raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, I want
to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit,
to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on
the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented
reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to
new artistic expressions that call into question deep-rooted concepts such as museum,
art and reality.
Many centuries have been spent researching, testing and creating the same type of
art, whether sculpture, painting…. Except for the birth of new “isms” within these
disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be
convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation… Thinking
about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the
technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress
happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand
this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision
and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there
are no previous references to support them. But, at the end of the day, every new
artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art.
“Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.”
The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective
that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings,
church, political powers… This is why today (without underestimating the technique and
the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the
end, it was created by and for the power itself. Then, this type of art collides with the
urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who
decide what is “art” are the people.
I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own
hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath. Now we live in a new paradigm
shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.
-A. L. Crego 2017
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