David Gorriz

david-gorriz-pieta
Pieta
11.4″x9″; handmade collage: art book and magazines; 2016

David Gorriz
London, United Kingdom

STATEMENT

In a society based on images and in which a social relationship among people is mediated by images, my artwork claims these back to take out their original meaning, to create another perspective of the use that we make of images and create a new dialogue with the viewer of my artwork, to encourage criticism of the atrocious world that the civilization of merchandise is leaving behind.

I usually work with figures, images with an implicit meaning in the social ideals established by the capitalist society. My artwork questions these concepts of pre-established ideas which are deployed along my compositions in scenarios estranged of their habitat and context. It is these scenarios where my artwork leads the viewer, a comfortable environment for question and reflection.

The pictures of my artwork create their own stories, forming narratives that are completed in the viewer’s imagination and they can be interpreted in different ways. I like the idea that my work should speak for itself.

I use magazines and books that I have been collecting from flea markets and secondhand bookshops to create different series of collages. Some of them by using a basic rule of sourcing two or three images and others are more complex and surreal.

The search and collection of images in a medium such as collage, encompasses a very important part of my creative process and it feeds itself from a game that is based on, long and continuous scans for specific images and others which are generated in a fast and intuitive way, sometimes by chance, to find images that convey the generic theme of my artwork, on which I work in a conceptual and aesthetic way.

Colour and composition are the main characters in my artwork. They are fully related, being sometimes the contrast in tonality what decides the composition of my artwork, revealing extremely marked influences of photographic aesthetic and photographic design. The use of sketches and taking pictures of these guide and make more dynamic the process to determine the desired composition.

I experiment with the different possibilities offered by collage. In my artwork, I develop another technique of collage found by the artist Gil J. Wolman, known as art scotch, a technique in which the ink is transferred from the images of the magazines to the tape, allowing you to compose with the same tape strips.

The limitations of collage for me become sources of curiosity and enjoyment. Components such as chance when searching images or being subject to the restrictions of size and colour. There are no options to resize, adjust or change colours.

BIO

Self-taught collage and mixed media artist born in 1975 in Zaragoza, Spain, with a degree in Architectural Technology. After living a few years in Barcelona, I am now living and working in London. I have exhibited my artwork in Zaragoza, Barcelona and London.

I have always shown a great sensibility and curiosity about art, but it was not until I discovered Dadaism and Punk that I decided to start making art myself. What made a mark on me was the death of bourgeois art understood as individual art and made for the upper class, as well as the idea that art is part of anyone and everyone should develop it and not only “the chosen ones”.

My study of art spread over other avant-garde like Constructivism, Surrealism, Lettrism and Situationism, these are some of the artistic movements that created background to rethink and to strengthen my idea about art. My artwork is a resource that supports the popular art, accessible to everyone, able to question the individual on the set values in a consumer society.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.davidgorriz.com

IMAGES

david-gorriz-three-men-and-a-child
Three Men and a Child
11.4″x9.8″; handmade collage: art book and magazines; 2016

david-gorriz-the-holy-family
The Holy Family
11.8″x9″; handmade collage: art book and magazines; 2016

david-gorriz-the-marriage-of-giovanni
The Marriage of Giovanni and Giovanna
11.8″x8.7″; handmade collage: art book and magazines; 2016

david-gorriz-tomas-aquinas
S. Tomas Aquinas
12.2″x8.3″; handmade collage: art book and magazines; 2016