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.
…
His work has been exhibited at London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona.
…
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.
…
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…”
…
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.”.
…
[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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.