The Others

Meet the Others: Hugo Rami Pérez

The Game Changers. The Rule Breakers. The Innovators. Discover some of the fantastic emerging talent showcasing their work at The Other Art Fair.

Hugo Rami Perez how he found his passion for creating digital art by chance and how he incorporates his skills in traditional painting and he motives behind creating art into this new 21st century version of watercolour

Tell us about who you are and what you do

I am an architect from Spain. I’ve spent the last 15 years living on the Island of Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, such an inspiring paradise Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. My creation comes directly from my emotion. I call my work “MyBrain” precisely because my artworks are directly related with what’s happening deep in my mind. My paintings and my projects as an Architect are just two faces of one unique artwork. Some of the ideas I paint, come to my mind when I am developing the project for a building or urban planning, so in a way I turn the “unreal” into “real”.
I paint emotions. Human rights, justice, and environmental protection, are all big motivations for my life and work.

What are the major themes you pursue in your work? 

You could say that in a way, my paintings are kind of an emotional diary. I usually draw the emotions I want to share, and I share it through these impossible landscapes, cities, or worlds. The drawings act as a kind of research on how the environment can reflect and transmit our emotions, as individual human beings or in common, as a society. That tangle of intertwined sensations shape the complexity of a precise moment of existence. They started as personal drawings, that allowed me to go ahead through the path of life, and step by step they turned into something else, an unlimited way for my imagination to express and communicate, a philosophy for life.
I represent different emotional moments combined with the human psyche in its transit through life, essentially duality caused by that inescapable vital anguish, which to a greater or lesser extent we all feel some time, and in fact, what makes humans question everything and evolve. When I look at my paintings some time after they’ve been made, they take me to the precise moment in the past I was painting, and it comes together with the emotion I’d been feeling at this moment, anxiety, peace, relax, rage, frustration, astonishment, impatience, or any other.

How did you first get interested in your mediums and what draws you to them specifically?

My work as an architect made me difficult to find the time and tranquility to paint as often as I felt I needed, for many years.
So, one day while I was in the lounge of an airport waiting for my delayed flight back home after a reunion in the island of Tenerife, I started to use my tablet in a new and artistic way, I started painting exactly the same I used to do it with my watercolors. I unexpectedly discovered that digital painting produced into my mind the same “healthy feeling”, that watercolors did before.

How has your style and practice changed over the years?

Since I started to use digital techniques, I’ve been going ahead and discovering technology is not an enemy for traditional arts, but a friend who allows me to go further and deeper in my research about human emotions without abandoning my former ways of painting.
So over years I’ve been walking that path integrating more and more my former way to paint into the new digital, and in time it became into something different, my own style.

Can you walk us through your process? How long do you spend on one work? How do you know when it’s finished? 

It is difficult to say how long I spend on one single work. In fact, there are some which I do in only one step directly from the beginning to the end. But most of times I intentionally stretch out the process, to enjoy the most this kind of research with the intention to figure out what exactly an emotion means.
But on the other hand it is very easy to know when a painting is finished, because there is always a moment in the process in which the painting gives me back the feeling I’m looking for.

What series or project are you working on next?

At the moment I am carrying out a new collection called “Uncertain Future”, regarding all these “new” feelings, confusion, fear, that combined represent our social mental stage at this world-wide confinement.
It is a weird period in which uncertainty about how the future it is going to be make people feel in a way we don’t really felt before and we don’t actually understand well, we feel unprotected, guide-less, and lost.

What is the best advice given to you as an artist?

I’ve been painting all my life, but it was usually something for myself.
One day three years ago, while I was passing through a deep depression I was not able to see the light at the end, I spent long times painting for myself, and a friend of mine told me “You have the responsibility to share your work to the world. Believe in you”, and this advice I followed changed my life forever.

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