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THE WHITE APE: ART [Paintings - Ilustration] / INFO

Gerard Ruz Miquel was born in Tarragona on 1 January 1979. Being born under the influence of Saturn portended that he would be a responsible, enterprising and loyal young man, but being born seven days after Jesus Christ and seven days before Elvis would end up making him an outsider.

He grew up in deepest darkest Catalonia - relatively unpopulated areas that develop slowly and are full of contrasts, where talent is as scarce as money. As a young man he went to Barcelona to receive lessons on theory, trends and disenchantment in an elitist graphic design faculty. He shared apartments with the famous, with losers and with others who would end up losing themselves. He met singular artists (creating a single piece of work) and people with the odd knock, clumsy musicians and budding DJs, tattoo artists and sailors, children of decadent aristocrats, skaters, hooligans, people from the north and beyond. Together they would frequent raucous locales where communication required patience, they practised games, experimented, intermingled invented references and arrived at no conclusion. You can't ask more of a city than to arrive at no conclusion; if there were any certainty, no-one would go on living there.

 



 

 

In order not to out his name too soon, and to keep the wolves from the door, he decided to sign with another. The White Ape was born in Barcelona on the day "Copito de Nieve" (Snowflake) died, the prince of western albino hominids. TWA happily followed suit and strove to collaborate in the future development of the species by cementing his philosophy, developing the cultural and aesthetic pillars of the new era.

The columns on which the coliseum would be built were Black Sabbath and Francis Bacon; the engravings for the book "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" by Katsushika Hokusai and Northern Soul, women tattooed innocently in hidden away places and Arts & Crafts, the Victorian aesthetic, the English casual aesthetic and the old essays on animal anatomy he used to copy when he was a child.

With these ingredients, some simple tools and zero knowledge of how the market works, TWA carries out his work in an arduous, daily and irregular fashion. The results have not been optimal but the journey is certainly fun. Come by and have a look, take part in this flight, smoke, eat the US-produced peanuts and plastic chicken of the in-flight menu, discover what evolution has left inside you.

And if you don't like something, disguise the taste with wasabi.