Mindaugas Matulis
Artist Feature
Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.
Bubi Canal - Into the Gloaming
Feb 09, 2022
Bubi Canal is a New York-based artist from Spain who works across photography, video art, and sculpture. His primary focus is on photography, which allows him to incorporate elements from other disciplines into his practice. He combines performance, fashion, sculptural objects, and graphic design elements to build his own world for the camera. This world is often inhabited by characters and still lifes he has created by blending everything from American and Japanese pop culture to Cantabrian mythology to aspects of his own expansive imagination.
Working intuitively in response to his environment and personal experiences, his projects each reflect the current moment in his life, like a journal. While the characters are constructions, the models are friends and family. He styles them as dreamlike beings from alternate realities using handmade costumes and everyday materials from his environment. He combines continuous light and flash to create bold and graphic staged scenes that underscore his dramatic themes of hybrid mythology, identity, and personal history.
His aesthetic hovers between the real and fantastical, revealing his sense of wonder. His images are often created in natural locations from a bright palette of colorful costumes and geometrically shaped objects. These are made from playful materials and are often worn or held by his subjects. However, his subjects’ facial posture and expressions remain deliberate, as he allows them to communicate through their own spontaneous gestures.
Ultimately, Canal’s work inspires us to create our own dream worlds where magical things could happen.