The painting in the painting.
The painting in the painting , that is the idea that the artist Julio Anaya Cabanding was pursuing when he began to paint works of art on graffiti and street art in the streets of ** Malaga **.
He, who was in his fourth year of Fine arts , decided one day to accompany a friend of his to graffiti abandoned buildings and there he put into practice everything he had learned (which was not a little).
“He had been researching trompe-l'oeil, pictorial meta discourse (the painting within the painting) and the site specific; concepts that led me to develop different lines of work. One day a graffiti artist friend told me to go with him to paint in the street, I went and did what he had been painting in the studio, paintings in trompe l'oeil . I liked the result and the relationship between the painting and the environment so much that I decided to continue doing it”, Julio tells Traveler.es
And after a few months… “my works began to attract attention among some important people within the artistic field of my city, they also gave me an artistic residency scholarship in Germany and later, I participated in very beautiful and interesting projects such as Casa Sostoa and Genalguacil Town Museum”.
To make these pictures takes about 5 hours.
But it was thanks to the interview in the American art magazine Colossal that he made the leap. “Large media outlets contacted me and many others echoed from them. A week after the first interview was published about 40 articles about my work had been published on websites around the world , and in more than 11 different languages… crazy!” he says.
The interest of his paintings lies in the fact that they are small replicas of great classic works . Caspar David Friedrich, Claude Monet , Johannes Vermeer... they are artists that I love and paintings that anyone, with more or less knowledge of the art world, identifies as uppercase art associated with the great artistic institutions”.
His main decision was to paint these paintings so that his parents and some of his neighbors, with less notions of art, could identify them.
We will never know where they are (or yes...)
As for locations, they are not chosen at random . “For example, the painting is painted in a place that represents himself. A seascape, representing a port, is painted in a port. Or the representation of a romantic landscape, where we can see the gaucin castle , is painted from the Genalguacil viewpoint in Malaga".
Can we find them easily? Julio has painted in Malaga, Cordoba and recently in Granada , for the project curated by the Espacio Lavadero Gallery . He has also done a couple of interventions in other countries like Germany and Canada.
** Unfortunately to fully enjoy his work we will have to resort to Instagram ** or choose randomly abandoned places in his native Malaga , because (for now) Julio does not indicate where his paintings are.
So somehow he keeps the secret and, who knows if in the least expected place, a work of art appears.