Statement

CarlieFive Alias Chr5 is a Spanish artist originally from the Canary Islands. His creative field combines graphic design, generative art and crypto-art.

In his thinking, art is a vehicle for personal and social transformation that transfers power to people and provokes changes in individual and collective consciousness. He sees making art as a dignified way of facing existence and transforming the world. Interested in virtue as a vehicle for personal fulfilment, his work addresses the recovery of the sacred gaze of his indigenous ancestors.

Through illustrations, digital painting and videos, the artist represents these geometric motifs common to all pre-axial peoples mainly in the digital medium. His interest in storytelling has led him to develop animated works that combine geometry and art strongly inspired by pixel aesthetics and video games. The artist uses the language of the contemporary image to address the rationality of the modern world and to propose paths and avenues for such self-realisation. In this sense, the relationship between the rational and the irrational in the human being is one of his central themes. He develops this question especially through his series We Robots, 2010-2023.

An artist with strong links to the digital world, he uses graphic programming and generative art as part of his videos and installations. Aspects such as the mutability of the work, the abstraction of the landscape in movement or generative geometry are part of this other experimental aspect that the artist develops with code and certifies in blockchain networks as part of his artistic discourse.

Recover the indigenous gaze

The sacred gaze of our ancestors is a gaze full of respect for nature. Preaxial cultures, mainly animistic, recognized the soul in all things. This sacred or religious look at nature made it something respectable. Something with its own will. Faced with the commodification of the world, the indigenous gaze allows me to recover the primitive, magical and animist gaze, a gaze that is necessary for us to achieve a balance.

And first steps in art consisted in exploring the indigenous identities of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands through the vegetal symbols in plants and animals.

Generative Art: the world as a labyrinth

Another characteristic of our world is that we live in the saturation and complexity of information. This excess of information is a double-edged sword. The silver lining has to do with the fact that we have never had so much knowledge freely available at our disposal. The flip side of this abundance is that we need the right tools to interpret and navigate all this informational complexity. This excess can saturate us and prevent us from properly interpreting reality. The concept of reality is currently subject to the imperatives of information. In this sense, my interest lies in making visible aspects of our world that can facilitate its understanding.

In 2015 I began to take the first steps in this direction through my generative art work Binary Structures. Binary Structures is a creative game through generative art with processing.org that visualizes a random series of simple 0’s and 1’s using colored lines. This exercise helps me understand how to go from a basic data to a visualization.

Robots in the dialectic of the rational

The world that we have lived in is a constructed, built world, a rational world directed by architecture and efficiency. Architecture defines space and this structures our mind. That geometric reality contrasts with the intimate architecture of our body, our emotions and our instincts.

My new collection WeRobots reflects on the dialectic of the rational and the irrational in the human being. This contradiction is represented through architecture and the body. Why do we inhabit a geometric world if our body is organic? How would that subject be totally adapted to the constructed world? What kinds of things do robots dream about?

Exhibitions