Thursday 20 September 2007
Profile: Nano4814
¡No te lo pienses, tío, ante la duda, la más tetuda!During the summer of 2005, I travelled with a small group of friends to the Balearic island of Ibiza (Eivissa, if you are a Catalan and intend on being pedantic) in search of sea, sand, sex and sangria. Whilst the island is oft documented as being a hedonistic playground for underage drinkers and midlife crisis-suffering ageing techno-monkeys, there has never been much focus on how pretty the island itself is. So, to cut a long story short, during the days we took full advantage of our hire car and did a wee bit of sight-seeing. Whilst enjoying a leisurely stroll around Ibiza Town one day, I spotted a quirky stencil design in the corner of my eye.
I really cannot tell you what it was about the design that caught my attention. Maybe it was its neon-colouring. Maybe it was the subtle juxtaposition of the neon-colouring with the chalk-white, typically Balearic, wall. However, if I were I betting man, I would wager that it was probably more down to the fact that the stencil was of a cute, almost anime-looking, wee cat. Man, I am a sucker for all things feline.
A few months later, thanks to Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, I learned that ‘the wee cat’ was actually called El Gato (‘the cat’, in Spanish, imaginatively enough) and it was the work of an artist who goes by the name of Nano4814 (‘N’ from herein). He originates from Vigo, which is located on the Atlantic coast of Spain, and, to paraphrase his own words, chose the spray-can as his medium of expression in around 1995, having earlier spent the summer of 1991 ‘listening to Public Enemy and first experimenting with a spray can’ through architecting a piece that simply read ‘SEMEN BOYS’. As an aside, in 1995 I was still learning algebra and figuring out the most efficient way of undoing bra-straps.
"I know Ms. Pacman is special. She’s fun. She’s cute. She swallows."
N studied Fine Art at the University of Vigo during a nine-year stretch (1997-2006) that puts even the great Van Wilder’s fictional tenure at Coolidge College to shame. By his own admission, he simply spent his time ‘adding elements to my own particular formula of interacting with the streets’, ‘paid more attention to other things’ rather than his grades and only finished his course out of pure stubbornness: ‘at some point I was told to quit, but I don’t like following the advice of others’.
N attributes his career choice as being the ‘natural evolution’ of his spending all day skateboarding in the streets as a youth. In fact, he considers skateboarding to be his ‘main influence as an artist and as an individual’. N comments:
Seeing streetlife from on top of four wheels gives you another point of view of the city – you see it as something creative – and I think that makes you want to be a part of it; be in everybody’s daily life, watching them from the walls
"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth"
Citing Dr. Stump, a Japanese cartoon, and the crazy world it portrays as one of his influences, N also gets inspiration from ‘music, everyday life or situations that make ideas pop into my head’. It is safe to say, judging by the results that I found for the programme on Google, that Dr. Stump is utterly crackers.
In addition to this, during an interview with Wooster Collective, N also cites ‘truckloads of LSD’ as another of his influences. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that N’s work is based around his own world of similarly bonkers and surreal (normally neon) characters – be they rabbits, cats, kids, cows and all sorts. These he uses to ‘always try and give the viewer something that won’t leave them indifferent’. N firmly believes that sarcasm and humour are important and every one of his characters ‘usually has some story behind them’. For instance, El Choquito ('the squid') is a ‘representation’ of N and the medium that he uses: ‘swimming in the streets, spreading the ink’.
useless fact #3:
N’s favourite fictional character is (currently) Jimmy Corrigan - The Smartest Kid on Earth (aka the protagonist in the widely acclaimed graphic novel of the same name by Chris Ware)
N believes that recently his work has been ‘turning more introspective… self-conscious and also less anecdotic’ and that he is currently at a point where the three different lines of work that he had previously undertook meet. His work as a designer has always been detached from his personal work, whilst his work in galleries is increasingly focusing on things that N is concerned about on a personal level. Added to this, N’s work on the streets is ‘becoming more of an escape value that helps me survive in a big city and more tags and throw-ups [rather than] big murals’. The latter signals a return to N’s Vigo origins: simple iconic characters in basic colours in downtown areas.
"Sleep is the cousin of death"
As well as working on his own, N is also a member of Los Niños Especiales (‘the Special Children’), whose work can be found online at www.fotolog.com/los_especialitos.
2007 has been good to Nano4814. Among other things, he spent a month in Toulouse painting for the Rio Loco festival, contributed to the Cultura Urbana festival in Madrid and prepared a show with Equipo Plástico in Seattle.
"You talkin’ to me?"
Despite the fact that N is well known outside of Spain and that he always seems to be busy, he has yet to achieve success in the capital letters sense just yet. Call it a hunch but, to somewhat plagiarize the introduction to N’s interview with Subaquatica, this may have something to do with the fact that he is terrible at self-promotion and does not yet have a proper website through which to sell his wares.
My attitude during all these years of street activity has always been the same: do what pleases me and ignore everyone else. I never worried about documenting or promoting my work. The important thing for me is the action itself: doing and being there at a precise moment, alone or with others, and being able to display on a wall what is in your head
This may have something to do with N, bless his little cotton socks, not liking the term ‘street art’ or ‘street artist’. It gives him ‘the creeps’ as it is a media label and he does not believe in lumping people together by virtue of the fact that their chosen artistic medium is the spray-can, posters or stencils. He does not ‘feel very connected’ with some of his similarly-labeled contemporaries. It follows that, by not proactively self-promoting his work, N is simply comfortable ‘doing’ his work rather than being praised for it. And good for him.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about this eccentric Spaniard, you could do a lot worse than checking out his MySpace (www.myspace.com/nano4814) and/or his Fotolog profiles (www.fotolog.com/nano4814).
posted by Si at 11:00
