About Dreams and Reality

Manolo Mesa (1989) is a Spanish artist from Bilbao, Spain. He began experimenting with graffiti on the streets at a very young age. With a body of work that now goes beyond graffiti, Manolo’s paintings constitute metaphors of life, encounters and solitude. He uses photographs, fragments from magazines and sometimes the internet, to derive iconography that relates back to the absurdity of our existence. His work talks about the relationship of human beings with nature and depicts the diluted surroundings and sights from the cities he visits or reminisces about. Manolo’s creations can be found all across Europe and now also in Asia.

Consequently, ceramics, which are both personal and collective, have been a constant case study in Manolo’s work. They have slowly unravelled themselves as symbols of resistance to the homogenization of industrialised products. While studying the practice of handmade ceramics intimately, Manolo acknowledged the figure of the woman as the forebearer of this tradition in India and across other cultures. Often, the craft has flourished and been broadly celebrated, but what has often been left out are the real storytellers. Echoing this reflection, Manolo painted the image of a woman partially hidden by a pot. The image, almost magically repeated twice, activates a sense of recognition from the viewer while paying homage to the knowledge bearer - women all over the world from whom he, and many others, have inherited this timeless craft.