"Not many graffiti artists like to paint the streets in the nude. But Kenor is not just any graffiti artist. A self-confessed extraterrestrial, a born performer, Kenorâs organic, kaleidoscopic productions are geometric representations of sound and movement, visual interpretations of music and dance in two-dimensional form. Whilst the production of art must always be understood as a performative act then, Kenorâs images are saturated with this corporeal trace, artefactual remnants of his burning energy. Their multicolored, effervescent hues, their fluid, protean contours, mean we are forced to enter into, to travel into his paintings, to travel within his âabstract architectureâ, his architecture âfloating in the cosmosâ.
Up until 2000, Kenor was focussed on more traditional urban art, obsessed with typography, logos, and textual experimentation. Yet as the Barcelona movement gathered pace, Kenor found himself wrapped up within the changes, forming designs which functioned as âparallel worlds, dreams, hopes, illusions, questions, options and exitsâ. His urge to transform the city, to counteract the ever encroaching grey with a wealth of colour, has been one which connects these two phases in his career however, an irrepressible urge to âdecorate the dead citiesâ, to make the street a âgallery for everyoneâ. What thus moves him is the texture of the city, the âboundariesâ, the âabandoned, damaged, wornâ parts of the street. These sites call him, seduce him, they necessitate repair, resuscitation, reanimation. Kenor has thus become something of a spokesperson (through both his words and images) against the increasing commodification, the greyification of Barcelona, a spokesperson against the new laws which have come to repress so much of the cities previously active street-life. From skateboarding to performance art, break-dancing to busking, street practices have been curtailed whilst the city still attempts to market itself through its liberal, cultural heritage: âThey made their own city, and their evolution goes the way they choose, yet it also contaminates the future, keeping marks for another kind of culture in our streetsâ¦They want to promote only for their interest. They support for a day the same people they punish to win the sympathy of the young peopleâ.
Despite this, Kenor has continued to produce, to revivify the city, his works increasing to a now monumental size, covering walls all over the world. Yet he has also moved into new realms, not only installatory and sculptural, but a deeper progression into video and performance art. Films such as âFloating Pointsâ, âDentro de miâ, and in particular "Cualquier lugar, un dia cualquiera", more readily display the connection between dance and inscription, the choreography of the image. Like a living organism, Kenor thus simply wants his work to keep constantly evolving, to âre-create spaces of freedomâ, submitting the viewer to âendless optionsâ. Whatever medium he works within then, he wants the recipient of the image to be a âfree playerâ, a player âable to choose and imagine a new dimension that allows it to growâ, one unrestricted by the image, captured by infinite possibilities of the line."
