A. L. Crego
A. L. Crego is a 21st century digital art revolutionary at the intersection of art and technology. 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.
- 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
Digital Public Space 2: Bringing The Streets To The Screen
In this continuation of his groundbreaking “wall meets web” digital street art series, 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 Malakkai, Sabek, Elisa Capdevila, Sr. X, Mr. Thoms, and Animalito Land are brought to life through the mesmerizing GIF magic of A. L. Crego, making for the first ever digital murals to bless the blockchain.
I. Malakkai
Isaac Malakkai is an illustrator and street artist with a very recognizable style. Painting in the streets since late 1999 early 2000 you can find his artwork from Spain to China, Mexico, and all over Europe. Isaac was born in Almería, Spain, currently based in Denmark.
A huge lover of digital art and spray paint and small gif loops, always with a touch of irony and an attachment for contextualisation and non-bright colours. His studio work has been seen in solo shows in Barcelona, Almería, Paris and Aarhus.
A. L. Crego x I. Malakkai
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
Sabek
Sabek (Madrid, 1985) begins his work intervening the streets and abandoned places around Madrid where he developes his graffiti style in the early 2000. Later he starts to produce more figurative work experimenting with different techniques and mediums in addition to his work on the walls. His unmistakable style is recognized by the representation of silhouettes inspired by nature and animals, particularly noble and powerful animals that provoke a strong sense of respect. His work poses a reflection on the human being and his relationship with the primal instincts.
In huge murals around the world (USA, France, Spain, Malaysia, Russia, New Zealand) SABEK shows us the hallmarks that make his style so recognizable. A particular mixture of subtlety and power in perfect balance in which the shapes and masses of flat colors, used almost as symbols, coexist perfectly with the most delicate details. Animals represented in a minimalist way that intermingle with plant forms and human representations in an allegory of natural balance and the energies that it channels. SABEK creates his compositions without making the symbols yield to the logic of what the scene is supposed to mean, and thus their works, rather than reflecting a reality, create it.
His work is shown in galleries in Spain, France and the United States.
A. L. Crego x Sabek
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
Elisa Capdevila
Elisa Capdevila‘s artistic career began in 2014 while she was studying painting and drawing at a traditional school in Barcelona called ‘Barcelona Academy of Art’. She started painting murals during that time, first as a mere exercise where the canvas was replaced by a wall, later realizing its broader possibilities and deciding to focus her personal work around these larger scale projects.
Since 2017 Capdevila has been actively working at urban art festivals and creating large murals both nationally and internationally, as well as spending the time between these projects at her studio in Barcelona developing her personal work on canvas.
A. L. Crego x Elisa Capdevila
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
Sr. X
Sr. X is a Spanish street artist based in London. His work in the streets is mainly done mixing stencils with brushes and more traditional techniques, some of his inspirational themes are pop culture, films, publicity and urban legends, which he normally gives expression to through stencils, paste-ups or installations. His creations are often wrapped in a distinct tone of irony and social criticism, frequently shrouded by a veil of sharp humour. In addition to his work in the streets, he likes to experiment with mixing street art techniques and more traditional elements such as acrylics and oil on wood panels in his studio, bringing his canvas creations one step forward with a more polished and elaborated process.
In most of his work Sr. X reflects about the personal and social human relations with themselves or with other people and with society. Using imagery from adverts of the 50’s he extrapolates and creates a relation with the fake lives and empty sense of fun and enjoyable life reflected on that kind of art and era with the same attributes in modern times with social media and fast consumerism culture, always from a humouristic, surreal or ironic point of view.
Sr. X is currently working with Saatchi Gallery in London.
A. L. Crego x Sr. X
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
Mister Thoms
Born in Rome, born in 1979, Mister Thoms began to paint Graffiti in 1996 and is currently one of the best known Italian street artists. Its very name evokes an onomatopoeic sound that suggests the elasticity of its art: Mr.Thoms, the real name of Diego della Posta, is actually a multifaceted artist who expresses himself not only through Street Art, but also through painting, llustration and graphic design, in a constant search for balance between the ironic mood and the expressive concept.
Mr.Thoms plays with bright colors and geometric shapes to create movement. The walls where he works have a direct influence on his subject. His great understanding of architecture and body language allow him to capture the essence of his characters. This is what defines Mr.Thoms skills, his ability to represent movement on the walls, but at the same time express a concept, sending a message on which to reflect in an ironic way. Active in the street art scene, he participates in urban art events and festivals all over the world, Italy, England,New York Denmark, Hong Kong .Germany, Russia, California, Mexico, Portugal and Spain,spreading his ironic and cutting style. His talent is to transform ordinary places into extraordinary places.
A. L. Crego x Mister Thoms
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
Animalito Land
“Animalitoland” is an emotional refuge identified by a strong presence of light & color, and Graciela’s signature characters. They invite you to lower your guard and investigate yourself, without judgement or rush. She hopes that sharing your findings will help building better bonds with yourself, and each other 🙂
Graciela works back and forth with pixels and pigments. Got her first digital pen in 1999 and taught herself to draw, learning from comics exchanged with friends. Combined with her Graphic Design degree, she specialized in Character Design for both commercial works as Art interventions. In 2011 she took her characters to the streets. Attracted to the unknown, in 2014 she quit stability altogether to become a full time artist, world wide nomad -which is the exact reason why she believes in a decentralized future-.
Her work was featured in Conferences as Pictoplasma (Berlín), Group & Solo Exhibitions as “Corteza Invisible” at Swinton Gallery (Madrid), Books as “Street Art” by Lonely Planet, Documentaries as “Wonder Walls: the story of Irish Street Art” by RTÉ, and Street Art projects throughout 15 countries around the world.
A. L. Crego x Animalito Land
Editions: One
Pricing: Accepting Offers Only
*Timed auction will ensue once reserve price is met
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
