Dhani Barragán

Since I was very young I have been interested in drawing, so much so, that I spent hours doing invented drawings and copying comic illustrations like Spider-man. Entering adolescence I became interested in graffiti, and from there, I investigated much more with color and shapes, besides appreciating the work of the great graffiti artists of the time (early 2000). Although graffiti influenced me and interested me a lot, I did not get to practice it in depth, giving priority to drawing on paper, creating sketches even in class hours in high school. This interest in drawing and painting led me to begin studying Fine Arts at the University of Seville from 2008 to 2013. After the university years was when I really began to exploit the ideas I had had during the years of study. It was when I slowly began to develop my own style based on what really interested me in the art scene. In the lowbrow was where I found a style that I really identified with. Taking characters from pop culture to give messages with them through comic and polemic scenes.

The idea of creating seemingly friendly and visually cheerful scenes with a critical and dramatic background is the biggest motivation I have when working, as I always try to convey a critical and social message. I was always very attracted to cartoons in which the characters had transformations and physical changes, such as Dragon ball, Pokemon, Transformers.... Those changes, transformations or fusionese, attracted me from the first moment and are options that I love to adapt in my current work, giving new forms to others already recognizable within pop culture. Technically, lowbrow and pop surrealism are my reference styles, since they allow total freedom of creation, inventing scenes that could never be seen in any other field. Pop culture characters are considered for me as the new symbology, in the past artists used certain elements to represent something subtly that could only be appreciated by people who knew the meaning of that symbology. With these characters that are known worldwide, messages can be given to a much larger audience without any intellectual elitism. Mainly the characters that I like to use in my works are those that interested me the most when I was a child, such as Bug Bunny, although I like to expand the range using any type of character that I like visuality.