Multidisciplinary artist Arturo Prins creates fanciful, inventive worlds, which he portrays via colorful paintings, staged photography or video projects. His hybrid landscapes, displaced figures and impossible scenarios speak to the interconnectedness of the 21st century and are undoubtedly informed by both his transnational reality and his passion for all art forms, including those beyond the visual arts—literary, cinematic, and musical references abound in his work.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Prins has resided the past twenty years in Madrid, Spain, where he is based as a flight attendant. Indeed, by art historian James Meyer’s standards, Prins is perhaps the ultimate “lyrical” nomad, as poetic themes of mobility run deeply in his multicultural collages and invented scenarios. Unrestrained by subject and medium, Prins’s work thus embodies a sense of temporal, physical and mental collision, which arguably find precedent in the imaginative work of Henry Darger—despite the fact that Prins’s artistic approach is resolutely positive. For Prins, humanity, even with its faults, failures and dark side, is infinitely beautiful. Visit Prins online: arturoprins.com.
The following conversation took place in New York City at the end of Prins’s three-month sojourn in city.
http://www.underwriteart.com/main/2011/05/14/artist-interview-arturo-prins/
The studio he worked in New York,
and the Ps1 Moma Public Visits....
http://ps1.org/studio-visit/artist/arturo-prins
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Prins Circus: the visionary madness of a lunatic, the fantasy of a flying child, the discipline and the road of a disciple with the rare wisdom of metaphysical magicians. Come inside and see. There are several platforms, each one with a different show. However, in each show the main actor is the same person: Prins. Illusionist, juggler, outspoken clown, clumsy tamer, and symbolist tightrope walker. More than that, a trapeze artist. Often endowed with a romantic genius, a poet´s imagination, like a silent crazy tramp, he is peaceful in his appearance but powerful in his imagination. He produces simple images, as coarse as a caveman’s; others are delicate to the invisible detail and expressive as a blast, or as a lithium shot right in the middle of the frown. Always disturbing, often hypnotic. Here comes again this image of a little king wandering around his own private World, amidst a galactic chaos, far away from the Herat. Somehow, his creation is disheartening. A large part of his work seems to escape the earthly nature of mankind, and there flies over the paintings a subtle parade of gleaming angels, muses, or gods, creatures not belonging to this universe. The mundane (meaning that which rises from the domestic up to the collective), is just a counterpoint to the fantastic, the extraordinary, the sublime, hovering brightly over the paintings. The Prins Circus is surrounded by a black moat made of a homeless foreigner’s loneliness, a sinner’s earnest search for redemption, an egotistic monster’s yearning to overcome his weakness and liberate himself from his solitary confinement. Prins’ work is a pursuit in a desert, a desperate craving for kindness. From the mundane, the material, the sensual and the erotic essence, basically, to portrait the soul as the room of a Chinese palace in a dream, which in turn is a box full of toys, which in turn is an allegory of the planetary system which in turn is the infinite universe. There are strange mechanisms by which there is a surrounding feeling that everything is all right and will stay like that. We can also find bottles of silver perfume, watches of light, rundown time corners and absurd songs to gods and paths. The work of Prins contains the elemental particles of an egg-child-saint-girlfriend-intelligence-sun-beauty. What, you don´t believe it? Come inside the Circus Prins. As tourists, as drunken cosmic tourists. Abel H. Pozuelo. Art Crtiic You can see more art work in www.arturoprins.com Artist Interview: Arturo Prins http://www.underwriteart.com/main/2011/05/14/artist-interview-arturo-prins/
