Javier Calleja

Javier Calleja - Tomorrow More

Técnica: Serigraphy

Biografía del Artista: Javier Calleja is a Spanish contemporary artist born in Malaga in 1971. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Granada and later returned to his hometown, where he currently lives and works. Calleja's work is characterized by his characters with big eyes and exaggerated proportions, which invite the viewer to enter a figurative universe of ingenuity and simplicity. His paintings and sculptures are usually small in format and are full of humor and poetry, and his characters may seem childish but contain a critical and reflective background on contemporary society and culture. The artist is reluctant to talk about his work, preferring that the viewer interpret it and find their own meaning in it. According to Calleja, "good magicians never explain their tricks," and his work is like magic, brief but intense, capable of transporting us to imaginary worlds and making us reflect on our own reality.Calleja's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. He has received various awards and recognitions for his work, and his works are part of important contemporary art collections around the world. With his unique and recognizable style, Javier Calleja has become one of the most prominent contemporary artists in Spain and on the international scene.He has been fond of drawing since he was a child. His great-great-grandfather was Pablo Picasso's first teacher in his hometown.He trained for ten years to be a gymnast and participated in several Spanish championships. After retiring from sport, he studied Physical Education and then graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada. He worked as a Physical Education teacher in high schools in Andalusia before dedicating himself to art. Calleja cites artists such as Magritte and Rothko as among his influences, as well as movements such as pop art, surrealism and minimalism. Critics define his work as pop and kawaii (cute) and highlight the influence of Japanese manga. For years he created minimal works due to lack of space and to reduce the cost of production. In his paintings, drawings and sculptures he deploys the aesthetic conventions of cartoons and children's book illustrations, in his search for simplicity and immediacy. Bold colours are a constant in his work, as is a distortion of scale. His characters, whom he considers to be small versions of himself, are recognisable by their disproportionately large heads, naive air and enormous watery eyes, in which facial features with perfectly combined gradients contrast with flat backgrounds of a single colour and are accompanied by ironic, critical or absurd phrases written in English. His works are often displayed in an almost chaotic order or semi-hidden, inviting the viewer to make an effort to find them in spaces that are usually wasted, such as sockets, skirting boards, alarms or gaps next to the ceiling. He is also the author of medium-sized and even smaller formats, known as art toys with a long Asian tradition.