About the artist
POPAI 🇧🇪
(ðə) piː·əʊ·piː·iː·waɪ·iː
POPAI, or "The POPAI", is a Belgian conceptual artist. His core themes are society, technology and nostalgia. He combines innovative visual technologies with more classical art forms, continually sharpening the contemporary definition and synthesis of what art really is. An old discussion he believes is overdue for a new conclusion.
POPAI challenges his audience to tune their senses in a world where what you see is no longer real, what you hear is no longer accurate, and what you perceive may simply not exist. He lives in his own abstract universe and prefers to move through life unrecognisably, much like the characters that populate his works. By working primarily with bodies rather than faces, his pieces quickly feel personal and familiar.
He works mainly with prints in a distinctive palette of blue and orange, typically mounted on large wooden canvases. POPAI makes instantly recognisable work that literally catches the eye. POP your EYE.
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New art forms and movements are never inherently more valuable than their predecessors. What Michelangelo achieved lying on scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel is categorically incomparable to Duchamp's urinal, Mondrian's compositions or Warhol's soup. It was simply something different, and yet, for many, it earned the stamp of Art with a capital A.
The art world today seems to be in crisis, evading every objective standard, even that of beauty itself. There is a saying that contemporary art can be summed up as: "I could do that + you didn't." The arrival of convenient photography heralded the end of portrait painters. When digital photography emerged, it too took time before it was taken seriously, let alone called art.
POPAI is neither a classical painter nor a photographer. So what is he? He ploughs, kneads and massages his own blue-orange reality, using everything he finds along the way to answer that question. His creative process? Not particularly relevant. The result, however, is.
Whether it is art? He leaves that entirely to the viewer.
His exhibition "Once Upon A Time At The Video Arcade" received very positive reviews from connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike in 2023.
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Why so many orange circles and spheres?
Several reasons. As a reference to the orange lollipop, his official logo. As a literal play on "Orange accents" and the misunderstanding between human and computer communication: in English, orange is both a colour and a fruit, something POPAI explores throughout his work. The orange circle appears in many forms: sometimes as POPAI's head, sometimes as a sun on the horizon, sometimes simply as an abstract attribute.