OSCAR REY (ES)
Oscar Rey creates paintings, sculptures, street art and photographs. By simplifying reality into shapes and coloured blocks, he produces vibrant and expressive artworks that explore the universal themes of love, death and social critique.
His art is rooted in figurative representation, but above all Rey seeks synthesis and clarity. He achieves these concepts by simplifying his reality into shapes and coloured blocks. This technical approach intensifies Rey’s messages as he condenses reality to the essential, shedding the superfluous.
This artistic philosophy was influenced by Zen thinking and by Rey’s fascination with Expressionism. This label refers to 20th century art that distorted reality through the particular use of intense and non-naturalistic colours to express the artist’s inner feelings.
Oscar Rey
In Rey’s style, there are also evident influences of cubism in his flattened and composite treatment of reality and the absence of traditional perspective. This bidimensional effect is heightened as the artist creates homogeneous coloured shapes and patterned surfaces that lack any impression of depth.
Although his style is technically researched a playful approach shines through his creative process. In fact, Rey considers holding onto a childlike pleasure of creation of primary importance, as opposed to the intellectualization of art. This worriless and playful joy to experiment is expressed by the vibrancy of colours and simplification of forms in his fun and lively artworks.
Despite his cheerful style, Rey uses his art to convey powerful messages about injustice and to promote social critique. A recurrent theme in Rey’s art are new technologies and their alienating impact on human interaction. This may appear as a contemporary take on Expressionist philosophy, which was rooted in Europeans’ fascination with non-western art moved by the desire to escape from Western urbanism and social restrictions.
While Rey continues to evolve and experiment with new approaches and techniques, he affirmed that the constants in his art remain his love for expressionism, synthesis and the use of mixed media. Rey is also part of the Knot the Artist Collective, an international artistic group formed after our gallery in Berlin hosted Fresh Legs in 2018.
Video with the artist here >>>
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