“Urban Skills” in Alcoy, Spain brings Nuria Mora, Sebas Velasco, Demsky, Smithe and Dulk

October 30, 2018 Artists

A multiplicity of patterns and colors and fills and histories on intersecting planes that gore, cleave, hack through art and popular culture – this appears as a harbinger for the generation after Y. Fueled perhaps by the exuberance of youth and the desire to see and consume all things, to be all things simultaneously, the new kids are insisting that some manner of collage in three dimensions will accurately represent the upheaval we are experiencing in many regions. These are the effects of a raging globalism, at least on the surface – and possibly our efforts to rationalize what appears as chaotically irrational.

Fasim (photo © Jordi Arques)

How appropriate that Fasim is incorporating his own version of automatic drawing here on the large scale of the public mural while an invited guest of ‘Urban Skills, Urban Culture Exhibition 2018’ in Alcoy, Spain. His inspirations for this September work came his trip to the Louvre in August, he says, where he poured over Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, their individual histories and motifs swarming his mind.

“This psychological game has always attracted me because it changes all concepts, poses new meanings and I like to alter things,” he says in the group’s press release, “since I was a child I always try to see things from other points of view, even the impossible or delirious that are my favorite. It is an act of poetic rebellion.”

Fasim (photo © Jordi Arques)

As if carefully curated chaos, this first edition ‘urban art’ festival selects only a handful of artists from backgrounds of graffiti and Street Art from as close as Barcelona and as far as Mexico City, each carrying within them a virtual environment and ecosystem of aesthetic histories, each ready to spill.

Importing influences from urban culture with new murals by Nuria Mora, Sebas Velasco, Demsky, Smithe and Dulk spread across the city of 60,000 in del Centro, el Partidor, Santa Rosa, Batoy and la Zona Norte.

Far from the active urban cultures that gave birth to this music and art, these artists articulating the journey, reflecting influences from western art history, hip hop culture, and some of the global Internet vernacular of searching, and appropriating. A participatory project funded by a number of civic organizations, it looks like URBAN SKILLS chose some of the best voices to address this moment and to give a view into the future.

Fasim (photo © Jordi Arques)

Fasim (photo © Juani Ruz)

Fasim (photo © Jordi Arques)

Nuria Mora (photo © Jordi Arques)

DULK (photo © Jordi Arques)

Sebas Velasco (photo © Jordi Arques)

Manolo Solbes Arjona poses in front of this portrait of him at the piano in his “cave” by Sabas Velasco. Below he writes a text to accompany the work;

La espiral del consentimiento
roza su límite cuando los ojos trashumantes,
perciben como se alborota su mimesis
en el horizonte de la Osadía.

Mientras escribo
y Vincent se columpia en sus dibujos,
recuerdo una perfección en tu diáspora;
a los colores acariciando la Imagen,
y a los aborígenes del Territorio Serpis
atónitos, al ver aparecer sobre su estar
una sensación que, por azar, inercia
y armonía de los creativos
que invocaron al espejismo,
pudimos ver otra vez, a la belleza bailar
alrededor de una hoguera donde
la Pitecantra Madre aún nos llama.