Carlos Tárdez

Carlos Tárdez (Madrid, 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist who could be categorized in figurative art, however his paintings hide a deep symbolic layer behind an appearance of everyday life.

Both in painting and in sculpture, he has achieved a high level of quality which has earned him, among others, the BMW Medal of Honor in 2010 and 2018.

Whether in painting or sculpture, there are mythological connotations, double meanings and great irony in the reinterpretations of everyday scenes and objects. This fact is particularly evident in his sculpture where he uses a preconceived idea or an object associated with a meaning and turns it around.

On the canvas, he tries to express the idea in the most direct way possible, his pictorial technique and the realism employed are careful, generating simple and emphatic compositions in which the emptiness takes on a meaning and in many cases carries the conceptual weight in a treatment of the space which drinks directly from the abstract painting.

Color also has a direct relationship with the distribution of space, atmosphere and depth. The psychological influence and the symbolic value of color are of great importance. It is also common to see horizontal or vertical bands of matte black appear in his paintings which delimit the space.

It is a symbolic figuration, with a series of resources which have enriched its own iconography. The title of each of the works suggests and reinforces the idea on numerous occasions, always leaving open the subjective interpretation of the viewer.