Aggtelek

Gema Perales, 1982, Barcelona Xandro Vallès, 1978, Barcelona

Aggtelek is the artistic project of Xandro Vallès and Gema Perales.The desire of their unlimited visual appetite has made Aggtelek's work the typical menu of a fast-food chain, an exact X-ray of the times in which they live.

They attracted attention with their giant sculptures made of cardboard and hyper fast-videos where they created and destroyed sculptures with their bodies. Until showing his “Name Paintings”, huge 2m x m2 m canvases in which they reach the essence of contemporary art writing the names of people that in themselves are already a visual and narrative history. Or his very famous “Palacio Feliz Restaurant ” in which they set up with cardboard boxes and paper an authentic Chinese restaurant in a museum in which delicious noodles were served, a “living sculpture” as they called it in which you could go to eat and hang out with your friends.

His works are recognized for their humor, their color, their "Happy Conceptual Meal" and the desire to experiment, investigate and create new ideas in his series that they work in an obsessive way. They created their “Second Hand” series from the answer they gave to this question:

-What is the worst thing a contemporary artist can do?

And the answer was:

-Copy.

And that's what they did, they copy works by other artists creating paintings with markers bought at the bazaar next to their house. An original Jeff Koons painting created with cheap markers.

After becoming parents and seeing that they could not create at the rate they had been doing it all their lives, they created the series "Notebook Paintings" in which through paintings they write down all the ideas they have but cannot carry out, the books they want to read but don't have time to read, ideas for future exhibitions or things they want to see but can't.

His series of drawings range from a personal "History of Art” drawn through the genitals of artists from Praxiteles to Damien Hirst, to the "Weekend Drawings" series in which the whole family work and have fun drawing during the weekends. This last series of drawings is getting really big and rang from a giant file of drawings ranging from Palm Trees to Tabasco, from faces shaped like Picasso to Motivational Phrases, from abstact art to a portrait of Britney Spears or Yogananda. "Life on Earth" is another series of drawings in which they explain to a supposed extraterrestrial recently arrived on Earth what we do here. On Planet Earth.

With humor and a lot of color, their works is a reflection of the world in which we live.

aggtelek.net