Last week, at the opening of his latest exhibition, he was able to record a sketch of his latest concern: colored lights! Xupet Negre now intends to bombard the city with mappings. These paragraphs are the updating of one of the Catalan urban artists with the most empty aerosol cans behind them.
“But I want to do it without permission huh? –He qualifies in his studio, in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona–. I want to do illegal mappings, summon people to one place, like this in a semi-secret way, and then take them to another, to mislead the police and that, because surely this is also prohibited and they accuse you of fueling pollution. lighting, endangering traffic, generating crowds in public spaces… And then making light graffiti, real ephemeral graffiti, that only lasts while I do it. Wasn’t that one of the meanings of this? Disappear! It’s just that I was so impressed by what Refik Anadol did on the façade of Casa Batlló: 21st century graffiti!”.
Xupet Negre paints pacifiers on litter bins, sheds, traffic lights, service boxes, traffic signs, large dividing walls and pillars of bridges over highways, among other corners, since 1987. One afternoon he was in a chess club called El Oro that has since disappeared Negro, in front of two guys who reported some tripes that they had left over, who told the women who passed by them that they would suck this or that… “And it occurred to me to paint pacifiers… I took a felt-tip pen and painted one in the trash can across the street. Until then, on the walls, I only wrote phrases, punk songs… And the son of the owner of El Oro Negro was Inupié, one of the pioneers of graffiti around here, and he told me ‘come, I’ll teach you how to paint with spray’, and, well, since then…”.
That is the idea, the meaning of logo art, that you come up with something, something of your own and unique, and give yourself over to it in an excessive, irrational and exaggerated way. Until one fine day the people walking down the street tell themselves that that pacifier sounds familiar to them, until one fine day they recognize it in the most unexpected place, until you become a daily companion of people. Bombing indiscriminately is another way of communicating with people. As if you hung from his ear and sang in his ear a song that sounds like something to him. Until then, people, on the walls, basically painted graffiti letters, and also very political angry phrases. Then, later, in the city there was a proliferation of fish, mushrooms, flowers, hangers, an abundance of ice cream, and people began to photograph themselves next to them and post them on Instagram. And, well, the ill-fated Pier also had a lot to do with all this, but that’s another story. It was through these movements and others that do not fit in these paragraphs how urban art made its great leap, stopped being an encrypted and inbred language among the painters themselves and addressed the general public. Hence the relevance of Xupet Negre and the things that go through his head…
And at the inauguration of the expo orchestrated by the Lluís Coromina Foundation in the Espai Isern Dalmau, in addition to the sketch of the mappings, we also find NFT works, polyurethane pacifiers, a Warhol-like revision of the Catalan tradition… “It’s just that I’m very interested in digital works, and I made the art toys a long time ago, but no one paid any attention to me, so I tried again… And one day I was thinking about soup, Campbell’s soup, and I thought It occurred to me to do a Warhol-like revision of the Catalan tradition that I call Catapop, and since those from this foundation are very down-to-earth, I knew they would like these paintings. And I wanted to set up an expo about my facet as an artist in general, not just as an urban artist”.
No, the graffiti artist does not leave the aerosols after so many decades. “I go out into the streets two or three times a week. This is not left just like that… Many people ask me to paint the blind of the business. So if the police show up I tell them I have permission. And I also go on my own, because I see certain places and I can’t resist… But they don’t catch me anymore. Let’s see, a large three-color pacifier takes me five minutes, and a simple one takes 30 seconds. They already gave me the fines that they had to give me when the civic ordinance came out, a few of 400 euros each. But they screwed up, they put them together with some traffic and my lawyer got them to take them away from me, the ones they made me want to paint… But you have to look for new ways, right? this has been filled with wealthy posh, brats who only look for likes and designers who use the streets to promote themselves, who sign with the at sign and everything. Every two by three I have to go out to restore fish, because they deface them…”. You are not going to leave them like that, painted over, are you?
