To celebrate our up coming exhibition with Brazilian street artist Muretz. Our top wordsmith Meg Ellis had a little chat with him.
It Follows me Everywhere by Mauro ‘Muretz’ is an exhibition which sees the artist experiment with a new design front for his paintings, created in early 2017. The artists’ expert use of movement and unexpected composition captures a flow of energy that interacts with his faceless creations and penetrates his haunting scenes.
“Sometimes we ignore it, but it’s there always following us.”
Muretz brings something new to the viewer this year, and it’s something more profound. You feel his faceless characters and strikingly minimal designs somewhere in your core, and it’s hard to pin down what lurks there. There’s a silent poetry found between the effortless outlines of the scenes portrayed. This playful way that Muretz represents this feeling, makes his work more subtle and perhaps also more affecting than his earlier work.
When Mauro speaks about this collection, he really seems to be the embodiment of his paintings: bowling you over by eloquently, minimally and effortlessly explaining something so complex and human. He explains that the paintings portray a kind of loneliness which "is a feeling that we all have, a thought in the back of our minds which follows us. And it doesn’t allow us to fully live in the moment.” Manifesting this in his new collection, Mauro has represented something more enduring than the kind of loneliness that evokes tears and love songs: instead, an ever present kind of loneliness seeps through his images. “We rarely share those thoughts. We keep it for ourselves. It makes us lonely in that sense, even when we’re surrounded by a crowd. Sometimes we ignore it, but it’s there always following us. These drawings are about that.”