Simon Vázquez (b.1979)
Simón Vázquez (Barcelona, 1979) began his professional career in animation but shifted his focus towards fine arts (plastic arts) through studies at La Llotja in Barcelona. Having devoted much of his time to illustration up to this point he began mastering painting and sculpture with much of his work exhibited in renowned galleries locally and internationally.
Vicious bodies of mutated jelly like appearances, overflowing voluptuous Fellinian forms, whose dangling boneless limbs appear to be trying to escape the confines of their structures and skeletons. These are the grotesque beings created by Simón Vázquez. Monstrosities that reveal political lies, carnal lust, greed and media carnage.
In Simón’s work he flirts with the success of Hollywood and alludes to the scandals revealed by news feeds, yet these are twisted through his lysergic use of visual gags and manipulated bodies.
The artist's aesthetic style is a fusion of poster art, heavily influenced by visceral comic texts that display witticism and puns, over layered with forbearing shadows imported from gothic novels and expressionist cinema. In this eclectic journey Simón makes a conscious decision not to concede to established ideas of “good taste”, instead channelling the transgressive spirit of underground comics of the sixties. He claims Robert Crumb as one of his influences, alongside Manolo Valdés and Alberto Giacometti.