Óscar Seco | Superimposed Universe

Who is Óscar Seco?

Óscar Seco is a contemporary Spanish artist from Madrid. Óscar graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. In the class of Rafols Casamada at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid 1984.

Óscar graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid.

In the class of Rafols Casamada at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid 1984.

The artist shares with us work done exclusively during the Pandemic.

During the pandemic Óscar has been working from home.

He set up a separate space where he painted a series of medium-sized paintings, which he kindly agreed to share with us.

Óscar Seco's work is amazing!

The paintings drag you into their world, into another dimension, instantly grabbing your attention with the vivid colors, the exquisit detail, diving you into a fantastic parallel world to explore.

We asked the artist to tell us a bit about himself and his work:

The new series that I present in Munchies art club entitled #vamosamorirtodos* perfectly reflects the year of pandemic that all the citizens of the planet have suffered.

Due to confinement problems, mobility, lockdowns ..., this past year I chose not to go down to my studio.

This situation forced me to set up a small studio in my house where I have worked all year 2020.

In order not to complicate things at home, I decided to paint a series of medium-sized paintings 81 x 100 cm.

The series reflects with great irony the complex situation that we have had to live, and of course it is a compendium of all my obsessions narrated in my work in recent years, a world of infinite catastrophes where I can metaphorize with the situation that we have encountered.

Catastrophe tinged with irony is a constant in my work, be it pictorial, model or videographic, and war and disasters are almost always present in my work.

Disasters change the course of history and have direct influences on art, politics and culture.

I like to relate them in a playful, iconoclastic and ironic way with appropriate characters, from comics, literature, cinema or history itself, for example in the series dedicated to the Spanish civil war, where superheroes or monsters from Japanese series B are mixed with characters from our own historical memory.

In my work there are constant references to a forgotten childhood, to a shared childhood, temporarily located in the last half of the last century.

„Art has to function as a critical voice, harsh but without acrimony, as an opponent to this air of complacency that surrounds and drags us“.

I have always liked drawing and painting, in the mid-70s it was very difficult to find images that I liked to copy, there was no internet and the illustrations that could interest me were found in encyclopedias or specialized books on natural sciences, cinema, or history of mankind,

but I did have faster access to the typical collections of stickers of that time, albums about the human body, dinosaurs, history of civilizations, great battles, etc.

My father at that time worked for a Valencian trading card publisher, so from my earliest childhood I had access to all that wonderful world of full-color illustrations.

It made me discover a new world.

Another of my great passions is the world of graphic design and especially of posters, from Soviets of the beginning of the last century, war posters (which will be a subject later treated in the series that I dedicated to the Spanish civil war ), advertising, or movie posters.

I still remember with amazement premiere films such as Taxi Driver, 2001 Space Odyssey, The Dirty Dozen, Carrie etc, films that in most cases I did not quite understand, they frightened me but they expanded my imagination enormously.

The ones I liked the most were those double sessions where I discovered the Planet of the Apes saga, the Japanese monster movies of Godzilla, those of James Bond, those of World War II, or all those related to seventies science fiction such as Soylent green, A Man Alone, or The Andromeda Strain, summing up between this type of cinema where everything ended badly and my incipient taste for comics,

especially superheroes and my first forays into XIX century literature mainly of adventures, Jack London, Stevenson, Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, Salgari or Verne.

Last individual exhibitions

2020 Domus Artium Museum DA2 Salamanca - Spain

Kafell Gallery. Zaragoza, Spain

2018  Blanca Soto Gallery, "Sobredimensionados" Madrid

Gabinete de dibujos."Seres imaginarios" Valencia

„Oscar Seco stages parallel worlds, apocalyptic visions, superimposed universes connected by arborescent or intestinal traces that link nature with machines of destruction."

The cinema in general influences him, and especially the series B, the fantastic literature from Borges to Philip K. Dick, poster design or graphic design, are reflected in a work where political correctness does not exist“.

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*The translation of #vamosamorirtodos would be #weareallgoingtodie

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A very big thank you to the wonderful artist Óscar for sharing his work and his story with us.

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