Luis Pérez Calvo (Madrid, 1962) is an artist whose work draws directly from popular urban music, circus, cinema, searching in El Rastro and collecting old comics. Raised in the popular Madrid neighborhoods of Lavapiés and Embajadores, his symbolic repertoire responds fundamentally to the most popular Spanish and American culture of the sixties to eighties. Thus, in his works we find together the Beach Boys with Superman, Batman or the characters of cartoonist Ibáñez; classic food dishes with fragments of old magazines; or Bazooka chewing gum wrappers with advertising of Lucky Strike. Not to forget the references to Patinir and other classic artists.
Pérez Calvo –called archaeologist of popular culture by some– re-reads, paints, draws, cuts, sticks, ironizes and pays homage in an almost compulsive way, without rest, to all those beings and memories that populate his memory and that he tries to recover in a melancholic but humorous attempt to catch a fetishized society of a recent past that disappears gradually.
His work is based on drawing, often combined with collage, which he uses on all kinds of supports -including ceramics-. With strategies such as homage, the reference, the palimpsest or intertextuality, his works allow him to move in this intrahistory of small things, not with a desire to record major events, but small objects that build a history more emotional than historical.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid and in galleries such as La Gran, Blanca Soto, Liebre or Swinton, as well as in many national and international group exhibitions. His work is part of relevant private collections and the Masaveu Collection.