Last week, at the opening of his last exhibition, we could record some sketch of his last restlessness; colored lights! The Black Sucker now intends to bombard the city with maps. These paragraphs are the update of one of the Catalan urban artists with more empty aerosols behind him.
“But I want to do it without permission, huh? – nuances in his studio, in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona. I want to do illegal mapping, summon people to one place, more or less secretly, and then take them to another, to throw off the police, because of course that’s also forbidden and you’ll no doubt be accused of ‘feed light pollution, put traffic at risk, generate crowds in public space… And then make light graffiti, really ephemeral graffiti, that only last as long as I make them. Wasn’t that one of the points of it all? Disappear! I was so impressed by what Refik Anadol did on the facade of Casa Batlló… Graffiti of the 21st century!”
El Xupet Negre has been painting pacifiers on trash cans, sheds, traffic lights, utility boxes, road signs, large dividing walls and highway bridge pillars, among other places, since 1987. One afternoon he was at a now-defunct chess club called The Black Gold. In front of him, two guys were making some tripes they had left over and telling the women who passed by to lick them this or that… “And it occurred to me to paint pacifiers… I took a marker and i painted one on the trash can out front. 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 said to me ‘come, I’ll teach you how to spray paint’, and, well, since then…”.
This is the idea, the meaning of logo art, that you come up with something, something unique and unique, and you indulge in it in an excessive, irrational and exaggerated way. Until little by little the people walking down the street think that this pacifier sounds like something to them, and one 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 were hanging on his ear and singing a song in his ear that sounds like something to him. Until then, people basically painted graffiti letters on the walls, and also very political angry phrases. Then, later, fish, mushrooms, flowers, hangers, a barbarity of ice creams proliferated in the cities, and people started taking pictures next to them and uploading them to Instagram. And, well, the ill-fated Muelle also had a lot to do with it all, but that’s another story. It was through these movements and others that do not fit in these paragraphs that urban art made its great leap, it stopped being an encrypted and endogamous language among the painters and addressed the general public. Hence the relevance of the Black Sucker and the things that go through his head…
And at the opening of the exhibition orchestrated by the Lluís Coromina Foundation at the Espai Isern Dalmau, in addition to the sketch of the maps, we also find NFT works, polyurethane pacifiers, a Warhol-like review of the Catalan tradition… “I’m really interested in digital works, and I made art toys a long time ago, but no one paid attention to me, so I’m trying again… And one day I was thinking about soup, in the Campbell soup, and it occurred to me to do a Warhol review of the Catalan tradition that I call Catapop, and as the people of this foundation are very down-to-earth I knew that they would like these paintings. And I wanted to set up an exhibition about my facet as an artist in general, not just as an urban artist”.
“I go out on the streets two or three times a week. This is not left as it is… Many people ask me to paint the shutters of the business. Then 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 stay… But they don’t take me anymore. Let’s see, I can make a large pacifier in three colors in five minutes, and a simple one in 30 seconds. They already gave me the fines that they had to give me when the civics ordinance came out, a few of 400 euros each. But they screwed it up, put them together with traffic ones and my lawyer managed to get them taken off me, the ones they put on me to paint… But you have to find new ways, don’t you? this has been filled with rich people, ganapias who are only looking for likes and designers who use the streets to promote themselves, who sign with the arrova and everything. Every two or three I have to go out to restore fish, because they are plastered to me…”. He’s not going to leave them like that, plastered, is he?
