Mixed-race kids with bare torsos and bleeding noses. Wrapped in the Stars and Stripes flag, with their half faces stuck next to Lincoln’s, on the Capitol statue. The same Abe who would have taken up arms against those who stormed Congress encouraged by Trump. Pinocchio drowned face down in a pond (like William Holden in the pool at the beginning of Twilight of the Gods)
The work of Robin Kid, AKA the Kid, one of the new artists that hits hard, seems very naive and not at all. The enormous canvases of him, which hang in the MOCO in Barcelona, ??are reminiscent of the
Silence takes over the paintings and at the same time it is as if Rage Against The Machine’s “Burn, burn, you’re going to burn” came out of their pores. “I am not here to denounce anything, but to reproduce the world we live in, the one that no longer works at the pace of news every 24 hours, but at the rate of breaking news,” the artist who is known face to face confesses to Magazine. He grew up in the Netherlands and now lives in Paris. “I have two passports, but I don’t feel very European.”
Long blonde hair, angelic face, torn pants, cowboy hat, The Kid is up to no good and even less than cool. He cites great painters that he likes, but his biggest influences are Walt Disney and Jim Henson (creator of the characters from Sesame Street and the Muppets), “because they sowed the seeds of ‘follow your dreams and never give up’”.
“My work is changing,” he says, “now it is more fragmented. For me there is a need to return to the imagery of childhood, in which we felt safe. In fact, when we grow up we lose many of our faculties, I felt caged at school. I hated her. At 14 I went to the US, I never learned art, I looked at my parents’ Norman Rockwell books. What if I’m hyperrealistic? I look at others, at Caravaggio, for example, and I copy him,” she confesses.
What he does openly say is that, at 33 years old, his school is television, not books. “My great influence is television, the adventures of David Crockett (hence part of his aesthetic), who was an outlaw, who disobeyed and that served as a model for me. My teachers hated that. My training was television, in some way my work connects with a more primitive Warhol if you will. “We are a generation that has not read because of the millions of images that bombard us.” Some of his paintings make reference, in an innocent and very political mix, to how the police entered the University of Charlottesville due to protests over the deaths of black citizens.
In his opinion, the world is becoming darker. His next exhibition is dedicated to the most likely Republican candidate for the White House: “My next show in New York revolves around Trump. If he wins the election, democracy in the Western world is over. If the US becomes an autocracy or a dictatorship, there will be no more NATO, Russia will invade. In the United Kingdom there is already talk of being prepared for a war. In Sweden the same thing was told to its citizens the other day. Let’s look at the map, please – he insists -: Hungary, Russia, Belarus, many countries are moving towards the extreme right, like the Netherlands, look at the farmers, the tractors… Milei in Argentina. “They are voting for idiots.”
In the rooms of the MOCO, The Kid walks with his dog, among his own black sculptures, Indian totems that imitate the charred earth of Mars… “The world is burning and there are all these rich guys who dream of Mars…” How do you achieve success? “I don’t work for critics or to be liked, I work for young people, to reach them, to entertain them, to give them an experience. “I put pressure on myself to improve, to be the best.”
