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- "Frida in Flowers" collage by Felipe Cardeña at the show Wild Wild Pop in Milan until 15 January
"Frida in Flowers" collage by Felipe Cardeña at the show Wild Wild Pop in Milan until 15 January
22 November 2024
With great enthusiasm and a hint of mystery, Felipe Cardeña's Wild Wild Pop exhibition opened its doors at Vik Gallery Milan, giving visitors an immersion into his kaleidoscopic universe. Between garish fabrics, precious embroideries and an explosion of pop icons that wink at global art and culture, the exhibition looks like a mix between a cosmopolitan bazaar and a psychedelic dream.
Cardeña, a ‘trotamundo’ artist and master of organised chaos, invites us to look beyond the mere appearance of things, playing with familiar images - from Frida Kahlo to smiling emojis - that are blended in a triumph of shapes and colours. But beware: every element has its reason, every detail tells a story.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Cardeña's art is his ability to combine iconic pop culture symbols with historical and spiritual elements. Images such as Frida Kahlo, the Mona Lisa, Daisy Duck or tiger heads become narrative tools to explore themes of identity, power and belonging. Cardeña's approach challenges the barriers between high and popular art, creating works that are both accessible and conceptually layered, an aesthetic that is ‘wild’ and wildly polychromatic.
As Chiara Canali (curator of the exhibition) explains in the text accompanying the show: ‘The technique of embroidery and weaving, with its multiple and multiform colours, only enhances, from a perceptive point of view, the mixture and homogeneity of the details that combine to form the work and give even greater prominence to the icons in the foreground. Aesthetic and artistic icons that abstract themselves from the historical context of the moment and are charged with personal voices, narrative representations and identity constructions, with which we all still identify today’.
Felipe Cardeña was born in Balaguer (Spain) in 1979, but lived in Cuba for some time. A street mime well as an artist, he lived as an artist “sans papier” in many European and extraeuropean countries.
Operating in an anonymous manner, akin to the British artist Banksy, he has held three exhibitions at the Venice Biennale from 2009 to 2013, and has exhibited in Milan, London, Chile and China.
In the exhibition Miracolo a Milano, at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan, he stood motionless for six hours, “mimicking” the statue of the beheaded St. John the Baptist.
His style of anonymous graffiti and street art earned him the name "the Latin Banksy" and the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera called him "Banksy-style mysterious".
The Italian art critic Gillo Dorfles has described Cardeña's work as "kitsch elitario" (elite kitsch).
