Felix Roca: A Personal Investigation
Based in Barcelona, Spain, artist Felix Roca explores personal themes of faith, death, and childhood in his work. Recurring motifs of skulls and flowers are often embedded within brightly colored, somewhat chaotic environments, serving as visual metaphors that hint at a deeper meaning. Felix manages to create work that is ominous, hopeful, and at times humorous, while inviting viewers to contemplate the duality of life and mortality.
Tell me about your background and where your creative journey began.
I have been painting since my parents put a pencil in my hand at just a few months of age.
Twenty-nine years since then I have more or less earned a living as an illustrator, but it was not since four years ago that something awoke inside me - a need. Magazine articles and fashion posters were suddenly became meaningless. And I focused on my personal work.
I experienced fears and wishes of transcendence. Not for fame and name, but to appeal and to submit to something that was far and larger than me. Death started to become a strong attractive concept that had fear, future and a sense of a humor.
Trying to work around that concept and going deep on my own interests for the simple reason of what to paint or more importantly, what to paint for. I left my career as an illustrator, started working as a bartender to only focus on painting and those thoughts while I was at the studio.
After four years of self-analysis and painting, I produced a worthless number of drawings and works, until last year, in which I started a new path that put me into the feeling that I am finally onto something.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Thats a difficult question because you get that sometimes, and it depends how you approach it.
Painting and drawing is the last step of a huge investigation of work. It’s a collage of stolen ideas, and an increasing backpack that has grown with all those years of experience and collected references - from past and modern lectures, paintings and work by other painters on which then you have to apply your own filter.
So I would classify my influences in 3 groups;
- The milestone: everyone has it, the first kick in the head that, as a kid and first visitor of museums, makes you say “I want to do that” or just “Woah!”, that already shows an empathy for aesthetics.
That for me would be Romanic Medieval art, and Flemish painters.
- My top 3 great masters: you always carry them with you, and you have studied them, first forced in class and later on by pleasure. You can rely on them as old friends, and every now and them revisit them and you will find something new. I have a list of 10 great masters, and the top 3 changes every now and then.
At the moment that they are: 1. Jan Van Eyck, 2. Durer, 3. Jacques Louis David.
- And last but not less, top 3 living painters, the ones you can came across through social media or during an internet investigation. Those are probably the more influential in my work, in opposition with the great masters, which as I said are like old friends and just a pleasure to be with. This top 3 is more likely to change every 3 months if not less. I relate to them for the zeitgeist of the moment, the pursuit and immediate goals for composition, palette or formal aspects of my painting. And more easily, to be a passing by obsession that you drain out and throw away quickly for not to become a copy of them, which can be the most dangerous part of it.
Again, as in the moment of this interview, here’s my top 3:
1. Neo Rauch
.2. Ruprecht von Kaufmann
3. Michaël Borremans
Then, of course, are the nameless images that social media provide and my friends, and a special mention to my studio partner Chamo San. Art debate is a must be in order not to end up closed in your own bubble.
How has your work shifted and evolved over time?
As said, I started with fashion illustration, black and white drawings with a touch of color, mostly done with watercolor. Then I get tired of its lack of meaning and started a fight trying to endure in oil painting. Being a self-taught artist, I did not master it as an academical point of view, but it gave me a color knowledge to develop an atmosphere in my paintings used as a call for attention.
That has probably been the formal shifting point in my work and led me to realize that my pencil strength could combine with a bright oil color environment.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
A typical day in my studio starts always with coffee and cigarettes and at least an hour of investigation on what the hell am I going to do today.
Then I start painting. Its a 9 to 9 day work mostly in which just 4-5 hours have been entirely productive.
If I have changed anything about my practice, it would be that I am doing more sketches and color testing before attacking the main work. But I have to admit it has always been quite chaotic, I now know how to transform that chaos to not let the painting overwhelm me.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
I talk about adult life in my work, having an established relationship and approaching’ the 30’s kind of oblige me to settle down. That resumed in my head as death of the child, and a line of work appeared. Not from a regretful point of view, but from the joy of it and to keep it alive.
In those works there are four concepts that dialogue between each other:
- Faith
- Fear of Death
- Childhood
- Game
Faith and fear of death, an action and reaction to each other, come together to be opposed for the same duality by childhood and game. The summing of the four concepts can be understood as the day to day struggle of the adult life. Not as a pessimist view, neither, as a chant to innocence, but a consecutive presentation of individual postcards as allegories in which one of those four concepts is more important than the others.
I am aware that I have not discovered fire, but a way to create originality and more importantly identity.
Referring to technique, I have to say the years of advertisement illustration are evident - not to be hidden, but to be used to quickly put the concept on the frontline and allow me to hide the others behind. And to do so I mix pencil, and oil painting. The color and respect for this ancient method (but new for me) that I use more to create ambience than to round figures.
How has Instagram impacted your art career?
Even though I had seen my teen years without Instagram, my artistic career was born in the Instagram era. I understand it as a public feedback window. Even if i can be good with it or not, I see it as another tool as important as a pencil or a brush.
What are your future goals and aspirations?
Cohesiveness, to reach a point where I control every step of what I am painting, what I will be painting and knowing exactly how it should be painted.
Instagram: @felixrocaart