Jewelry & art. Some things are not what they seem by Bea Bongiasca and Guim Tio
Two young artists, clever and ironic, playful and honest. Their sense of humor and attitude break through the surface of their creations: the punny wordplay and ideas behind Bea’s collections, the way Guim refurbishes fashion images and inhabits his imaginary landscapes with faceless, miniscule human figures.
By mixing and matching her fondness for Eastern aesthetics with Western cosmopolitan tastes, the Milanese jewelry designer Bea Bongiasca jazzes up her intercultural philosophy and imprints a whimsical, perky and young style into her witty collections ‘No Rice, No Life’, ‘Fluoricultural’, ‘You’re So Wine!’, ‘A Golden Lesson’, ‘Happy Go Cola’.
‘Colorful, pop and ironical’ are the three words Bea chooses to define her creative ideology. Using the knowledge she gained during her trips across Asia, she dove into artistic studies, picking jewelry over sculpture. The result is a petite, adorable fantasy world and a micro-sculpture from a carefree dreamland in every piece. Gold and colorful enamel wines, adorned with vibrant gems, create an illusion of smooth and soft movement. They wrap around your fingers, gently sway in your ears, dynamic and lively, breezy and sweet. New lines, new playful approach to jewelry, bold pop look with a good feminine sense of humor,—to lift your spirits!
The Barcelonan painter Guim Tió Zarraluki performs a reverse—darkly humorous, tragicomically provocative—cosmetic surgery on images from fashion magazines: the images are treated with chemicals and oil pastels, altering the beautiful, pop-cultural faces, photoshopped to perfection, resulting in anonymized, abstract, disturbing portraits with bulgy eyes, grotesque noses and animalistic smiles, or even completely covered in multicolored stripes or bubbles, leaving only a small part of the original image untouched. Like an allegory of people undergoing excessive cosmetic surgery: becoming someone (or something) else in their eloquent attempts to look like a made-up, nonexistent ideal.
Guim’s landscapes, on the other hand, breathe melancholy and serenity, loneliness and peacefulness. Depending on your personality or mood, you may see them as sad or happy, depressing or cool. In the field, in a hammock, at a midnight gas station, in the middle of a lake, at a lighthouse, under the turquoise skies, in the malachite water, on the khaki grass and salmon sand, at the foot of the asphalt grey mountains, little humans are lost—or found?—amidst colossal spaces.
Two young, colorful, full-blooded artists. Bea—the eponym of joy and vitality, sublime and effortless femininity, and Guim—the messenger of the true nature of things, so eerily appealing and borderline spooky, both ingenious in their sense of beautiful and humorous, in the way they see art.
Look closer. What do you see?
