What lies behind the eyes? In the paintings of WESR and JADE, worlds open up in which the visible and the invisible flow into one another: masked figures, spirits and mythical creatures, people who dream, and dreams that take shape.
Between Everyday Life and the Spirit World
In South America, the home of magical realism, myths, spirits and everyday life often belong together as a matter of course. This closeness to the supernatural also shapes the work of the two Peruvian artists. Their images are surreal without feeling alien: they draw on Peru’s culture and folklore, on the rituals and legends of the Andes, and translate them into a contemporary visual language in which the boundary between this world and the next becomes permeable.
The Streets of Lima
Danny Figueroa aka WESR and Jonatan Rivera Enriques aka JADE are among the founders of Peru’s urban and street art scene. Their figurative paintings glow in bold colours from countless walls in the Peruvian capital. In WESR’s works, the traditional masks of the Ukuku appear again and again: a figure from Andean folklore, half human, half bear, who mediates between the world of humans and the world of spirits.
Behind the Eyes
In Behind the Eyes, the two artists present drawings and illustrations on paper as well as acrylic paintings on canvas. For JADE, the exhibition at Pretty Portal is also his first visit to Germany.
WESR
Danny Figueroa aka WESR was born in Chiclayo, Peru, in 1980 and grew up in Lima, where he started out as a graffiti writer in 1996. In September 2008, he moved to Berlin and has since regularly commuted between Peru and his new adopted home. In his paintings, he combines influences from Peru’s indigenous art with the aesthetics of Japanese manga, with masks and faces giving rise to mysterious, almost ghostly figures. In recent years, he has painted large murals at the STROKE Art Fair and the CityLeaks Festival and shown his work in exhibitions in Berlin and Munich.
JADE
Jonatan Rivera Enriques aka JADE was born in 1983 in the Andean highlands, in the Junín region, and grew up in the Chorrillos district of Lima. Self-taught, he came to art through graffiti. He was shaped by the aesthetics of the Andean highlands, which he knew from his family, and by the work of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His paintings tell poetic, often dreamlike stories in which social reality and surreal mysticism intertwine.
“Behind the Eyes” (In the Streets of Lima)
WESR & JADE
Opening
Friday, 4 May 2012, 7 – 11 pm
Exhibition
4 – 25 May 2012
Pretty Portal
Brunnenstraße 12
40223 Düsseldorf
