Dear Drap-Art Friends,

This week’s artists from our Call for confined artists are Rafael Arroyo and Gisella López.

Rafael Arroyo Villemur is an enamel artist from Asturias, who lives and was trained as an enameller in Barcelona. He obtained the Crafts Mastery by the Generalitat de Catalunya and has a long history in the field of artistic recycling.

During these months of confinement, he has used the materials collected and accumulated in his workshop to build a series of unique pieces. They are assemblies that seem to ask us, between bewilderment and a critical spirit, about the harmful effects that our consumption habits cause to the planet.

The sobriety and monochrome character of the pieces made in this period are a reflection of the emotional state that the artist has lived through during these months. All the pieces are waiting to receive the vibration, color, life and optimism that the that the fired enamel, so characteristic of Rafael Arroyo’s work, will confer to them.

Our second artist is Gisella Lopez, an artist from the Colombian Caribbean. Head of the La Isla Bonita collective and organizing member of the Brujería event since 2014. Career in plastic and visual arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla. Art assistant for Shakespeare in the Caribbean, 2015-2017. Meritorious thesis in 2016 with the work Tenoria: the story of how I got to the house of the black Eufemia. Exhibition in Contemporary Art Museum of Bogotá, 2016. Killart street art festival, 2018. 2nd place in Hidden Walls street art festival, 2018. Street art, graffiti, contemporary art, Caribbean, lettering, drawing.

A composite question inspires her work for this call. Does the absence of humans represent a vacuum for Earth and how do humans complete the planet?

The support of the piece points to a place while the rust speaks of time.

The idea is to represent the absence of man while concepts such as absence and emptiness are addressed. They refer us to the verb empty. In addition to the earth as a mineral element that speaks of time.

The idea is compacted in the action of emptying soil. So, the image seeks to interpret this action based on the fact that etymologically the word earth refers to dryness, which is not water.

The dirt / sand tells us about things that were here a long time before us. We are in the midst of an epic moment of self-submission as a species. Today more than ever we are aware that life can continue its course without the human species. However, the human would not have seen the light without the conditions that this planet once gave us.

Visit our YouTube Channel to see her video!

Thank you