Low profile inhabitant #1, 2023
“Sandpaper head” — that’s how his skateboarding friends used to call him back in the early 2000s in La Palma. Like many artists of the millennial generation, he began his visual and aesthetic education through everyday culture: rollerblading in the streets, reading comics, watching anime, listening to Anglo-Saxon music, and carefully studying book, CD, and fanzine covers.
Influenced by the American underground wave of the 1990s, the punk graphics of the 1980s, and Asian naïve art, Grip Face immersed himself in the rituals of graffiti and its later deconstruction. Early on, he recognized that art could be a means of survival — a personal language and resistance tool. Drawing and painting became weapons of mass creation against the anxiety of contemporary life. From there began a multifaceted artistic journey centered on the constant reexamination of his own imagery and practice.
With the sensibility of an artist-engineer, Grip Face bridges contexts, materials, techniques, spaces, and people. His primal visual language—formed largely within the public sphere through projects like Doors Without Destination and Black Faces (published as a book in 2016)—has evolved into a dialogue with private and institutional spaces through site-specific installations, sculptures, paintings, and tapestries.
Projects such as Not Rented to Humans and Black Rubbish Is the Future reflect the anxiety and unease of being both witnesses and participants in the slow self-destruction of our environment. His sketchbooks, which he has kept since adolescence, embody the most intimate and unfiltered side of his work; they serve as preludes to his finished pieces.
Navigating between margins and disciplines seems intrinsic to Grip Face’s identity. Having always perceived himself as an outsider—uneasy with categorization yet driven by curiosity—he observes a society perpetually disguised, addicted to technological massification, mediated communication, superficial relationships, and the concealment of truth.
Like a screen repeatedly flashing an “error” message across overlapping windows, Grip Face’s paintings create a layered, playful space where the concerns of an impatient, hyperconnected generation are dissected. His process is meticulous and slow, resisting the immediacy of the digital age: every layer is reworked, crossed out, or concealed, forming a meta-universe filled with aesthetic references intrinsic to Generation Y, Z, and those to come.
Each work belongs to an ongoing series — an evolving exploration that mirrors the artist’s own process of learning and transformation. For Grip Face, meaning lies in continuity, in the impossibility of a final outcome, and in the uncertainty of where painting will lead. His practice embodies the act of living artistic expression as we live in the world itself — transiently, critically, and in a perpetually uncertain present.