Nano4814 (Vigo, 1978)
Lives and works in Madrid.
Nano4814 is an elusive artist with outstanding multidisciplinary ability. His creative output manifests itself in anything and everything: paintings, sculptures, street signs, murals, tags… the list goes on. Nano’s affiliation with the street arose initially out of a fascination for skateboarding and particularly the aesthetics of the culture surrounding it.
He began to develop his creative work more than 25 years ago in his hometown, taking his first steps within the traditional school of graffiti, although over time he has managed to develop a much more personal and iconographic aesthetic. At the same time, his large-scale murals perfectly demonstrate the strangely discomforting and surreal, yet visually arresting style which we can instantly recognize as Nano’s own.
After graduating in Fine Arts at the University of Pontevedra, he made a brief formative stay in London, studying in schools such as Saint Martins School of Arts or the London College of Printing. In 2004 he moved to Madrid to develop his artistic work and began exhibiting in galleries and institutions both in Spain and abroad, bringing inside his own experience working outdoors and questioning personal subjects in a strange context. Among the many projects in which he has participated, we could highlight Street Art at Tate Modern in London, Planet Prozess in Berlin, and Urbanitas exhibition at MARCO de Vigo.
More recently, he was part of Crossing Borders / Crossing Boundaries in the SAM Museum in St. Petersburg or Mapping The City and Venturing Beyond at Somerset House in London.
He is part of the art collective El Equipo Plástico, along with Eltono, Sixe Paredes and Nuria Mora, with whom he has made residency projects in Peru, China, Spain or Mexico.
In his most recent work, we can observe complex dynamic compositions of multiple figurative forms, anthropomorphic although almost abstract. Bodies superimposed or fused, mixed in a precarious balance that we do not know if it is struggle or help, intercourse or rejection.
Moving in a wide chromatic range of saturated colors and textile patterns that accentuate that abstraction we are talking about, Nano uses elements that become recurring symbols in his current work: brick walls, wire fences, broken wooden barriers or colored sticks, often broken into many pieces (allegory of the pictorial act itself), with hanging baits or amulets. Objects that encourage intrusion and transgression, as masks. These barriers both suggest and hide a veiled truth, giving clues but avoiding to clarify a painted reality. This ambiguity is perhaps the most decisive feature in the work of Nano 4814.
