“My drawings don't try to imitate life, they try to create a new life, to invent it,” Keith Haring said. And that seems to be what the Argentine artist Lucas Ninin (Córdoba, 1990) is after too. What he offers is a dreamlike universe, hooked onto reality but not shaped by it, shaped instead by the artist's dreamer's reading of it.
His creations are full of fantastical characters, halfway between the absurd and the naïve, with references to popular culture and to his own childhood. A world made up of humanoids, animals (elephants above all) and even UFOs, which Ninin draws in a style all his own, one that comes out as skulls with domed craniums and long, sinuous limbs. Rounded, soft shapes over angular, sharp profiles, something that describes the artwork itself.
An exciting proposal that draws on Surrealism, on Dubuffet's Art Brut and on comic and pop aesthetics. He paints on canvas or paper, with acrylics, inks and watercolour, and he also works on walls and objects. His output covers mural painting, illustration, graphic design and object design.
He uses basic colours (often just black and white) and bright ones, and firms up the silhouettes with a thick black line. Sometimes a single figure takes charge over a monochrome background, other times the composition fills up completely with graphic marks in different sizes, numbers, letters and symbols.
This artist, based in Paris, started painting very young. After getting several projects off the ground in Argentina and Brazil, he settled in the French capital, where he carries on exploring and developing different techniques.
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