NemO's

I started drawing when I was very young. I was so young I don’t think I even knew how to write yet. I can hardly remember that day but the one image that is still vivid in my mind is a drawing of “a red circle and two little eyes” that made me so happy. Thanks to my father one day I went to an exhibition of a local illustrator and this impressed me so much that from that day on I have never stopped drawing! I have always tried to live my life following my passion for art. When I finished middle school I decided to go to an art high school in my city, “Liceo Artistico”. Up until then my drawings were only on small pieces of paper, cardboard or wood that I found here and there. In those years I began to enter the “writing” and street art work even though the street art scene wasn’t very advanced where I lived. When I began drawing on walls in the streets I needed to find a name for myself, better known as a “Tag” that would allow me to be part of this new world. I decided that name would be Nemo. Nemo like the captain from “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, who fought battles against the war, the injustices in the world and the silences of the sea. Nemo like the main character from one of Winsor McKay’s first comic strips, in which he narrates the nightmares this boy has every night about amazing adventures in a fantastic kingdom called Slumberland. Last but not least Nemo like the latin word for “no one”. I have always liked the idea of calling myself with a name that means “no one”, that makes my work even more mysterious. I added “’s”, the possessive case, because it refers to my art, so the translation goes from “no one” to “no one’s” and this completes the paradox of this way to identify myself. I began to write my art name on walls like everyone else and started to elaborate these drawings, but writing wasn’t enough for me and didn’t satisfy me. I abandoned the writing and calligraphic aspect and I started reproducing my drawings on these walls. One day a friend said to me “you don’t just draw with a pencil, write with a pen, or play music with in instrument”, but everything you show comes from your mind and the beauty of everything that we show is in the construction of our thoughts. From then on I began to use my characters and my drawings to express myself and to release my ideas translating them into something visual that I couldn’t express with words. Slowly but surely I started to realize that drawings are very powerful because they are universal and this way you can defeat the language barrier. I started studying the best way to communicate a concept in a way that would reach everyone. I studied how to combine shapes and colors and eliminate every unnecessary element from my “narration”. In the meantime I began to develop a more illustrated and less detached approach for my drawings because I felt the need to tell something about myself in these drawings. In my drawings the important thing isn’t really the message but mostly the pursuit of technique and emotion. In my artistic career my technical approach had always been subordinate to what I wanted to express and to the composition of the image but eventually while I experimented new techniques I found interest in colors and recycled paper and I found myself figuring out how I could “paint” my drawings. Up until this point I had only used spray paint and acrylic colors but paper had something else to it; it was alive, it became alive the day it was created to create something else. The chromatic and sensory effect is a swirl of small images and words together and there are different textures that color the many “sounds” of the spirit of my drawings. My work is divided into essential and graphic images, with a social message and made up characters that carry out poetic and surreal actions like characters in who knows which fairy tale. Lately I have been joining the “paper technique” with drawings with social themes using this was of painting as a starting point for a new project and way to express things and I hope to accomplish this soon.