Interview with Raf Reyes

Raf Reyes is initially a self-taught artist. He succeeded first on social networks, where he still disseminates his creations and messages today, post-breakout.

A surreal + conceptual meta-artist, digital creator & curator, photographer, and fashion designer with his own namesake label VERYRARE™ c/o Raf Reyes, the uniqueness of Raf's art lies in his permanent research for innovation, and his rejection of the rules. Press ‘aplats’, collages, photos, paintings & quotes are altogether characteristic elements of his digital compositions.

Raf reverses traditional notions of rigidity, conventional artistic standards, and explores emerging trends in digital art. Evermore pushy with where the boundaries lie when it comes to his digital + analog skills mastery, Raf Reyes undoubtedly has moved the lines of digital art in the same way and worth as traditional forms of art.

Raf Reyes is also a committed artist: his work is the manifestation of his temperament as a man of Action, and makes him a resolute artist of the Present Moment.

Raf Reyes was born in 1998. After commercial studies at Warwick University, where he is exhibited permanently, he then joined the prestigious Royal College of Art (RCA) in London for Masters.

IG: @raf.reyes @rafael____reyes @surreality @veryrareclo 

Websites: www.rafreyes.art | www.veryrare.co

 Could you please introduce yourself and tell us how you started in the arts? and your first experience in art-making?

I’m young & woke. Just a curious 22yo-man who barely sleeps, navigating his way to evermore intense experiences and situations; originally from an artistic and commercial descent, with members of my family at each generational level deeply involved in either Fine Arts or trade. Fauvists artists permanently shown at Orsay, Louvre copyists, art dealers, gallerists and financiers. My mother works with ceramics and does mosaics for a living, and I helped her in the studio as a child. As far as I can remember, I always tinkered with her stuff, touching new materials, sensing textures, sometimes cutting myself with shards of glass, collecting bits and scraps in the street or from the forest, and archiving it or making something out of it. I have it in my blood, in my DNA; but nothing’s ever fully predestined though. It just happened. Through Warwick University’s societies (where I did International Management undergraduate studies), I carved my way into being a creative human being, and learned graphic design, animation, video-producing, photography & editing on my own; I also fortunately crossed the path of fellow individuals there who believed in me, had a foothold in the industry (DarmoArt), and gave me the opportunity to further advance in this ‘profession’/line of work (2017 ‘Métamorphoses’ exhibition at Galerie Gismondi, Rue Royale, Paris). 

How would you describe yourself and your artwork?

I let people do the categorization/labelling and box-framing. In an enumeration-description of what I consider myself to be realistically is one of a multi-disciplinary doer/polymath. An avant-garde trier of things. The ultimate, übercultured insider-outsider in-betweener. Bored easily; therefore experimenting with new techniques, media, materials, POVs so on so forth. A 21st-century-Renaissance; I extirpated myself out of the Matrix yet I’m coming back to it ineluctably. Raf Reyes is my alias, I’m not even real. I’m just an idea, a man-brand, a concept; a jack-of-many trades with many hoods, mostly talented at decorticating, appropriating, and assembling bits and scraps of information, papers, emotions. Making something beautiful and cathartic out of nostalgia and presentness; fusing antagonisms together in an-almost perfect harmony. 

Put simply, both me and my (art)work are like the ying & the yang, in a state of flux, One yet separate: as soon as I feel like I’m steering too much in one-direction and ‘sinking’ into a decisional crux dooming me to stagnation, I bifurcate. What truly stands me out is restless pseudo-perfectionism, constructive self-criticism +questioning, and sharp observation +visual memory retrieval skills coupled with work-life balance and good support systems by family and friends; but above all it is the conscious realization, rationalization and emoticization of the fact that nothing’s really original, and we’re onto just doing better copies of what happened previously in the past. There is a very thin line between simple and clean, legible, communicative and powerful artistic Creation vs. simplistically clean & overly-boring Production; I’m situated right at that fine line, between grunge and classic, breaking codes then inevitably reinstating rules, in endless cycles. Contemporary artists often want to express their own subjectivity with their works, their own feelings about the world, their sense that, at a given time of Day, they had something to say through the specific design choices they made, and of course this stirs controversy at times. But I don’t personally pick sides because I know beauty is and will always be in the eye of the beholder; paraphrasing Warhol I don’t think about making art, I just get it done, letting everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it; and while they are deciding I make even more art.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

The accumulation of the ordinary. Copy-pasting’s anomalies. Glitches. Apparent randomness. Negative space. Patterns, odd repetitions. 3% difference. Pieces of a whole, universes inside universes. Nature (a lot). Movies. Documentaries. Utopias & dystopias. Motivational speeches. Religious relics. Prehistoric fossils. Japan. The reflection of light and the abstract shapes formed by an olive oil & vinegar salad sauce spill. Rebel attitude, record album covers, zigzag rolling papers, sort of the accouterments of dope life and counterculture, and obviously underground newspapers. A cup of coffee in the morning. Everything really. Research showed that an ordinary person is bombarded everyday with tens of thousands of visual cues, logos, images, with or without him/her wanting, some studies even estimating this number to a staggering average of ~ 120K stimulis or ‘images’ going into your visual brain cortex, every day. Those can be sudden, lasting milliseconds, or longer and you start feeling like you’re hallucinating when you stare at a fixed point for too long. It truly fascinates me how most of the things we think as real are in fact just our mind constructs and interpretations kind of playing with us, made of our past recalls of moments lived or ‘recorded’ in blinks of an eye. 

I get lots of my kicks too from looking at type/fonts. A real typeface needs rhythm, it needs contrast. Typography sometimes seems so naive, foolishly built; very expletive at times. Magical. Type is a snapshot of an instant, telling you about its process in a single image in a very elegant and fast way. It’s a whole world in itself. Few people think about it but when you look at a page, it’s mostly white, and it’s the negative space shaping the positive curvatures of the letters, the kerning and the interline. Helvetica for instance is like gravity, the air we breathe, it’s the perfume of the city, one that you’d end up missing it if it was gone; we came to a point we accepted it being ‘just there’, less obsessed by it, it’s something we’re so used+ exposed to we don’t even notice it anymore, we take it for granted: I use type a lot in my Artpieces to structure space and direction and ‘the touch of the conceptual’ in the works, like a thread one can follow,, feast on, and gradually unravel. 

Last but not least, just like the spheres of my personality, my interests are very varied ranging from fashion to mythology, archive pages/internet moodboards & Y2K ads, through graphic design, music, furniture and architecture. Great minds like Martin Margiela, Dieter Rams, Virgil Abloh, Basquiat, MC. Escher, Giacometti, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ramellzee, Barbara Kruger (and so many others it’d be too exhaustive to quote them all) definitely influenced me too. I feel like I somehow owe them; definitely standing on the shoulders of giants, and my sole purpose in this life is to add my contribution, my metaphorical ‘stones’ to the Creative Empire built by humanity (so far), the very artistic-aesthetic-intellectual-philosophical grand edifice constructed by society (at large).

What emotions do you hope the viewers experience when looking at your art?

It took me three good years to really refine my style and my direction but as time passes I’m more and more orientated towards ‘absolute catharsis’; gearing myself towards it and using all necessary artistic means to this end. I’m convinced about the subconscious reminiscences and flashbacks one can experience (sometimes involuntarily) when looking/vibing at a deep piece of Art. Coming up and getting purged. Going to museums and making Art can be the best (and the cheapest) therapies. A big thing for me in terms of design aims is to get a sort of emotional response from a piece: I see it and if I say to myself ‘wooo I wish I had done that!’ it means it will do a lasting impact on me and will become a definite reference in my cerebral stockpile archive/neuronal logs; one I’ll eventually come back to, to perpetuate, reiterate, and speak in a different/fresh way. 

But above all is the idea of something being designed to stand the test of time. Hopefully the things that I design will still be seen, referenced and used in 20/30 years, hundred years etc, outliving me and constituting my ‘immortality projects’ in a way.  If you look at my artworks, you can somehow get the ‘lingo’, a type of ®® ‘branding’/vocabulary attached to me personally, not as a face, but to what I created. Transparence, trompe-l’oeil, street art brushes swabs and textures, amongst others. It may be bordering/surfacing the bizarre at times, with a more-or-less clear visual dialectic between reason vs. expression. My gallerists say its my language, linked to a signature style, a patte of my own; very layered (like the layers of the mind & the subconscious) and open to multiple interpretations. The closer you come to an artwork of mine, and the more you get to really see it for what it’s worth to you (the viewer) specifically, the more you can appreciate it.

When do you know that an artwork is finished?

This is very simple. You just "know it". It’s unexplainable. Ask any respectable artist, he or she would probably say the same. To me, it’s translated into an epiphany realization, not like an eureka moment but more like something in your guts telling me that the end render of the artwork just feels right, and great and satisfying as it is. It is a balance between having been challenged enough while doing it, and trying to convey something else than usual. Quoting Giacometti, ‘often my sculptures became so tiny that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust’, one should stop right before that moment (when everything built so far crumbles). 

What has been the most exciting moment in your art career so far?

I checked the boxes ‘major partnership with a brand’, ‘art fair’ and ‘auction house’ on my life goals bucket list this year, being exhibited at Salvatore Ferragamo’s flagship store (Avenue Montaigne, Paris) in March, the CADAF 2020 (Contemporary And Digital Art Fair @Miami/NY) .Art domain booth in June, and selling at the mythical Drouot in December.

I also had the immense honor last September to get permanently displayed inside Warwick Business School’s premises, alongside Basquiats and Le Corbusiers. My biggest artwork ever made, ‘Changemakers’ (225x225cm), in the very space I had stepped foot in for the last four years. I never thought I could one day occupy the same room as my idols and even less being chosen for such an opportunity. I was an average student there if you ask me, but I stood out, my way. And they noticed. 

How long does it take to produce one work?

It’s really varying and different for each and every piece. Non-artsavvy people tend to imagine that artists take the longest time to produce a work in actually being on the work i.e the assembling/‘hands-on’ phase. Yet not really. What’s really long in my opinion + case, is the ideation phase. Researching, moodboarding, feeling the vibe truly. A sound average would be a good week per artwork.

What exciting projects are you working on right now? Can you share some of the future plans for your artwork? 

I’m mostly working on honing my own 2020 mood right now. In such a weird context I’m currently doubling down on owning new mediums, exploring broader palates to express all kinds of crazy things I’m into at the moment. I work a lot using the white t-shirt as a blank canvas for my creations. Collaging on garment basically, with my namesake clothing label/lifestyle artwear brand VERYRARE c/o Raf Reyes that I launched in March with my elder brother. There, I’m creating named and numbered artwear statement pieces not streetwear; we’re trying to go beyond clothes, traditional format, done-and-redone shows, and the conventional ideas behind them. What we’re proposing is fashion ‘post-covidism’ (we have a whole manifesto about that www.veryrare.co), hoping it will entice others to mirror their value offering (for the customer) on ours, and push the fashion industry towards better futures. I’m also straying away from 2D and going hard into 3D, with sculpting, meshing and printing ‘scene-sculptures’ (can’t tell anyone any more than this, at this point).

Do you have any upcoming events or exhibitions we should know about?

My next gallery show ‘Jeunes Pousses’ happening in November (14 rue Coetlogon, Paris VI). I’m also looking forward for Paris Fashion Week in 2021, even though it might be digital and only fully displayed 100% online, I don’t really care, I’ll do my best, organizing cool+crazy runways; I probably will also cast some of my friends as models (it won’t have to be huge since it’s my first PFW) and work on the scenography as well as the VERYRARE statement pieces’ designs (of course). It will be a blast for sure. I’m excited!

Where do you see your art going in five years?

No limits really. Museums, universities, art fairs, established galleries, concept stores, pop-ups, shops, nightclubs, big brands flagships, private collectors homes, VC/PE funds’ headquarters, art collectives’ squats, the street. I’m bordering addiction when it comes to Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest archive pages, so it’d be great to see some more Raf in these too! Lastly, for the reader reading this, why not directly at yours?!: hit me up and let’s get to work ☻