Laura Vinós, Fran Baena, and Ramón Muñoz present “Jewel Quest,” a pictorial proposal in which each artist “seeks the jewel” within their own piece. Similar to the famous puzzle video game created in 2004, the artists invite us to explore these portraits and “find the gem.”

Hailing from Andalusia and born in the late ’90s, they grew up in a generation with little awareness of the years of apparent economic stability, but under the sun of a land that provides the perfect breeding ground for contemporary artistic creation.

Despite Andalusia being a place that invites creators to go out and engage in exchanges about how figurative painting will be represented today, they grew up scrolling through screens, giving them access to an infinite amount of information.

In this presentation for B4 Garage Seoul in collaboration with Yusto Giner, we will see how three zoomer artists have found the jewel amidst all the information overload surrounding them in 2023.

Laura Vinós (Córdoba, 1998) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Seville, completing her studies with an Erasmus scholarship at the University of Évora (Portugal). Her work stems from a symbolic imaginary—both universal and archetypal, as well as adaptable to the culture of our time—that recreates elements forming scenes where the fragmentary is experienced as a whole, constructed from various pre-existing sources that are reborn.

These images result in a long poem, a whole abundant in suggestion—inciting conjectures about what is being narrated. The painting thus moves away from the literal or obvious, playing between meanings, signs, and associations, also using language as a playful visual element.

For B4, she takes Gianni Schicchi’s family (Puccini’s opera: Gianni (Lauretta’s father), Rinuccio (lover), Lauretta (daughter), Zita (Rinuccio’s mother)) as an excuse; the idea of the pieces is to create four cards in the style of “gather the family” and the “find the seven differences” games, dividing each card into two and thus making “mirrors” of each character.

Fran Baena (Priego de Córdoba, 1999) engages with the youth of Contemporary Tragicomedy. Existentialist and witness to irony against sadness through digital imagery on social networks. His painting is linked to post-internet aesthetics, attending to its political poetics in the work process.

He is interested in how those images consumed on the web affect art with large formats, egg tempera, and homemade preparation canvases, whose traditional seriousness adds relevance to the sadness hidden by the consumerism of happiness; the transition to physical form of a painting previously articulated in Instagram stories with a round brush; or sandpaper and stippling as poetic links with anxiety.

In “Jewel Quest,” we see four characters who have helped him find himself, five works featuring a hysterical and deranged character, David Foster Wallace, Albert Camus, Eduardo Arroyo, and Ana Barriga. Fran seeks an escape from sadness in philosophers, novelists, etc.

Ramón Muñoz, born in El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz (1998), studied Fine Arts at the University of Seville, where he also completed the Master’s Degree in Idea and Production. His work is based on concepts such as doubt, identity duality, and self-absorption to address the representation of the self in ambiguous, simulated spaces, represented with or without a reference model. In this way, painting offers unsettling scenarios, loaded with ambiguity and subtle irony that seek to stimulate the viewer, focusing on what is yet to be discovered.

He aims to translate everyday situations into a personal pictorial language to generate a new vision of reality, which is born from the autobiographical and seeks to address current social issues in a lighter way. His painting incorporates all those experiences that have been present in some way during the creative process. The sum of these factors aims to distance the viewer from ordinary reality, offering a pause and inviting them to explore the universe formed between representation and evocation.

These pieces feature one or two figures interacting with an object. These are implicit situations where the mystery always remains outside the scene, enhancing the poetics and what is yet to be discovered. On this occasion, he wants to address the exotic, which is reflected in some way in the pieces.

COLLABORATION WITH

INSTAGRAM B4 GARAGE