:ADDENDUM:
ABOUT
FRANÇAIS
ESPAÑOL
Papaboule da Pentangeli is the alter ego of Alex Colao (Madrid, 1981). Graduated with honors in Fine Arts (UCM), since 2003 he starts his career as a graphic designer in the editorial field, mainly magazines and art direction. From 2009 to 2014 he settles in London to work and study at Central Saint Martins. Along with his design and illustration commissions, this stage sees his first steps into mural art and paste up. Back in Madrid, he starts using public spaces as a regular support with stickers and pasteups, besides alternating professional illustration with brand design, teaching, and in film and TV with concept arts and storyboards. Then in 2020, he starts university studies in philosophy to enhance his line of work.
“After years of working in the image field, being able to create unsupervised stuff to frame in a public space seemed to me a transcendent act, given the ephemeral nature of pasteUp. Yet this technique is not nihilist, but vitalist! Independent from conventional values, this technique accepts its existence as "Amor Fati" (embracing destiny as useful and necessary), a lend that points out the idea of the ephemeral as truer, in front of the mirages of illusory materialism. In opposition to the misleading concept of an unidirectional historicist progress, pasteUp embraces the idea of Eternal Return as a source of artistic expression. For me it's Ultra-art then; It is created then undone, and others will come, like mandalas, ice statues, even a song; If the only thing that does not change is that everything changes, the ever-changing pasteUp is therefore one of the truest techniques I have ever known. This may sound as a joke but it displays a deeper understanding; I guess that's why I embrace it with devotion, because it is, personally, the most real and fulfilling. Apparently now I'm no street artist, but a conceptual artist, whatever that means..."