My artistic work began and was inspired by my admiration for the muralists, the painters and the Romanic artisans, because of their tenacity to transmit social and moral rules to naive societies in the art contemplation and lacking aesthetic codes.
Next, I was struck by the influence of the sixties and seventies American Pop art. Painters, that under my point of view, resemble the Romanic ones. They also construct blunt, neat and succinct images at the service of the new religions; consumerism and frivolity. I admire Andy Warhol’s image sequences; their unexpected colors, their recapitulation capacity and aesthetic efficiency. And I also admire David Hockney’s colors, especially the blues, and its neutral, open and bright-lighted spaces, almost Mediterranean.
In the last years, my work has been recurrently centered on desire and self-portrait. These subjects can be considered risky and even dangerous. It is conceivable that my will to paint leads me to assume these risks and that is how my work makes sense. My references nowadays are `the natural nudes´ or `the daily nudes´ of Lucian Freud and the erotism that surfaces from Egon Schiele’s insolent desire.
I want to approach the classical Mediterranean painters in their treatment of the light, their vibrant and hued colors and their virtuous and expressive drawings. I am looking for modernity based on the painting styles I admire.
I paint because I have the need of finding the feeling of the unexpected, from the expressionist and pictorial gesture of the unexpected color and the light-based images. My compositions are slightly asymmetrical and apparently settled. The images stand up from neutral backgrounds in flag shape and opposite, industrial colors. I work in search of an ironical, disturbing, rare and sometimes even disgusting result. All together aiming at efficiency and aesthetical robustness.
My painting style thrives from the impact of being blunt, `no neutral´, scratching in what our every time more conservative societies detest: to look at the society itself without make-up and to see itself naked.
Pep Anton Xaus