Featured Artist | Mj Tom

Mj Tom | Athens, Greece
@losotros.mjtom

European Visual Artist Mj Tom chooses not to share any personal information.

Since 2003 he established the Visual Poetry | Urban Art Group LosOtros with his

alter ego Andrea Nada. He lives between Berlin, Barcelona and Paris.

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His work has been exhibited at London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona.

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His current body of work includes mixed media, collage, sculture, installation, and

digital printing. Irreverent and fleeting, able to define himself as a copy machine

of art, sarcastic and deliberately anonymous, he questions almost every probable

fact. The veneer of normality, the history as written, the common way of

understanding nature and oneself as a part of it.

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As he remarks “I don’t want much to be known “about me”. I am not trying to be

elusive as some people might say. I just think what is important is the artwork,

not the artist. I want you to have my work on your …wall, not based on who I am,

where I have studied or where I have exhibited my work. I don’t want to get

between “You” and the “Artwork”. I want to live quietly behind it… and pass away

sometime quietly…”

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Adding that “We are low value with high purpose. We are dedicated to noneducational

activities, self-indulgent thoughts, unfinished and incomplete actions.

Our work is not easily classified or marketable. This protects us from analysis,

judgment or criticism. We have no direction, motivation other than a cursed reflex

to purge our anonymous mental overflows in a public forum and then run away

from it and hide behind our cloak of concealment. Art is simply our lifestyle.”.

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[Curriculum Vitae on My Own Words]

There is no Reality | Until You Create One. Art is my way to conciliate with

reality. In some cases, I can bring it closer to my standards. And psychoanalysis

too. Both of them are hopeless. It is a try to put an order in the hectic world

around and inside me. To value better what had happened and possibly what is

happening, at least a part of it. It is a lost war. Before I can understand what had

happened in reality, or at least what I perceive as reality, the latter flips and turns

to something else. I ‘m a witness, an eye witness. I revise meticulously what it is

around me. I examine, select, collect, put in order emotions. Stating what is

important and what is not, what could be regarded as beautiful, or ugly, what

would be funny or sad. If I can’t change it, I can barely transform it, good enough

in order to compromise with it. Sometimes the attempt is successful, sometimes

it isn’t. I ‘m urban. I like nature but I feel comfortable only in the city. It is my

battlefield. Especially, the afterhours, when everybody sleeps so I can walk

quietly in the streets and hear the sounds. My paints they are made for me, but

in reality they refer to others. It is an attempt; to speak enough for me but not in

a verbal way. What is entitled inside the frame, presuppose my aesthetic

viewpoint. But what they produce is beyond my control. I exist in both of them. It

is a miracle, when it happens. Unfortunately isn‘t an everyday experience. Or, I

believe so.

My Reality | Ιn Halftones. My work is an exploration of paradoxes and

contrasts which are torturous and utopian, wild and serene but definitely resilient.

As my reality is in halftones, I capture fragments of life often ignored or

forgotten.

My art echo’s the unease and mixes it with the uncomfortable reality of

continuous transformations of the urban environment in which I live. Faces,

pseudo familiar situations, characters belonging to various walks of life… they all

inject emotions with such a warm identity to characterize the experience of

ordinary people, those people who would say and tell through the eyes their own

existence.

Ι represent ordinary people; those actors unaware of being protagonists of

present days and to represent them in spite of a reality in half-tone that

essentially results a kind of summary, which, in the end, is life! An arrested

motion in time.

In arresting motion there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than

reality, so I don’t arrest motion in time. I make it. I love my subjects although I

don’t know them. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never meat any of them or I

don’t know them at all, yet I live through them, or I can’t live without them.

They constitute my curriculum vitae.