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Los Angeles

See Pastel Pestilence and Mythic Murals in the Art of Aryz

An interview with the Barcelona-born, graffiti-trained artist Aryz's first major indoor art exhibition, 'PARAL•LEL.'
Images courtesy the artist

“It's very [a] different understanding, painting walls or painting in the studio,” Barcelona-based artist, Aryz, tells the Creators Project. “When you're painting walls you're interacting with the space, so before you put anything on that wall it's already a good picture with all the surroundings that it has. […] On the other hand when you work on a canvas it has to stand for itself.” Nonetheless, although uncharted territory for the young artist, the pieces in PARAL•LEL, his first major indoor art collection, opening today in Los Angeles' Arts District, echo Aryz’s youthful beginnings, in the quiet byways and unwatched walls of Barcelona as he searched for the chance of impromptu artwork.

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Aryz paints poetic murals on the canvases of cities and suburbia: building fronts and billboards, the sides of trucks, and sails of boats. At only 26 years of age, he's has already tagged several sites across the globe, in both Europe and the Americas with imaginative images, classical representations of myths, and dreamily skewed scenes.

For PARAL•LEL, Aryz brings his work to the walls of a more conventional exhibition space, signaling a dramatic switch of artistic execution. In both name and curation, the artist’s inaugural L.A. exhibit recognizes the natural contradiction of an indoor gallery of street art. Divided into two separate rooms, this show symbolizes “two geodesic lines that never meet in the same plane, but intersect at infinity,” the press release explains, just like “the dual constructs of the artistic space Aryz occupies.”

After a rocky introduction to the art of graffiti, with a crew of his high school cronies—“we made a big mess,” he says, “I went back the next day and tried to fix it but made it even worse”—Aryz successfully infiltrated the ranks of established graffiti painters in his city. Through the fortuity of artistic economy and providential pigments, Aryz then began to establish a common theme in his guerrilla murals. “In the beginning I was using recycled and leftover paint, which normally are de-saturated and pastel colors,” he explains. “So without even noticing I ended up having a very particular palate that not many people were using. At the same period my style was switching into a more melancholy imagery with the concepts being in accordance with the colors.”

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In PARAL•LEL, Aryz manages to maintain this muted, mythical tone in earthy color schemes and afterlife imagery: processions of skeletal, creeping creatures, undead crusaders, oversized skulls and crossbones. In anticipation of its opening, the show has additionally been extended beyond the gallery's four walls in the form of a painted ice cream truck; a demonstration, perhaps, of Aryz's unquentiable drive to brighten the streets with his spray-can and brush.

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Almost there! Posted by Aryz on Thursday, April 23, 2015

PARAL•LEL opens today and is open by appointment only until the March31. For more of Aryz's work, check out his website.  Related:

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