El Sol 25, an Original Mix Master and Street Collagist

April 16, 2014 Artists

Like spinning multiple vinyl platters at 78, 45, and 33 RPMs on old beige school library record players, this is a low-fi mixmaster whose visual style stands singularly, compelling and jarring. You have just bumped into a new El Sol 25 on the street.

Digging through the reference bin of your art history and popular culture signatures, you may want to decode where this compositional collision evolves from. Picking the pieces apart there appears to be little in common with the classical, the folk, the agrarian, the Egyptian tunics, the Greek marble, Sioux head dresses, sports trading cards, Depression Era glass, gilt frames and 50s TV depictions of svelte domesticity.

Perhaps it is the painted technique that lifts them to a common vernacular, creating an amber nostalgia for a time that never existed in the collaged paintings from Street Artist El Sol 25. Like crocuses and tulips they have recently appeared plastered around Brooklyn in a new spring campaign and while you never know when he’s coming, you sure know when he’s arrived.

El Sol 25. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

After wading through stacks of books and magazines, cutting and pasting limbs and feathers and tobacco leaves and intersex torsos together, he then paints enlarged versions of them by hand on butcher paper. He’s said that they speak to him, and so do the walls and doorways where they are pasted, and we have no reason to doubt it.

While we draw up short of saying we are fans to maintain an air of professionalism, he did rather tip the scale this time when we discovered that he painted a tribute to BSA on a popular spot in BK, and we’re sort of embarrassed — but of course we’ve already taken multiple selfies in front of it so clearly not that embarrassed. So there’s that. Even so, if the work had not been so consistently risk-taking and experimental and authentic in a pool of copycats, El Sol 25’s work would not have caught our eye and kept it.

El Sol 25 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

He once told us in an interview that his inspiration comes from a multitude of sources, “I get my inspiration from everything from walking to work or bad music or bad films or great films or good days or bad days. I get my inspiration from everything. I’m dependent on my work spiritually so I really like the idea of incorporating anything and everything into it. I take inspiration not just from what I’ve put on a pedestal – I enjoy everything.”

So for the gluttonous visual omnivores that are continuously pawing through images on your phone looking for a new sugar rush, this is your man. Because these are one-of-a-kind, labor intensive paintings on paper that decay in the wind and rain, catch them while you can. His pieces don’t usually get tagged over but the shelf life is probably a year at most.

El Sol 25 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Sol 25. His tribute to BSA. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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