Interview with Carlos Fdez (Penrider)
We recently curated an online group exhibition titled “Mind asleep, Body awake” and you can view it here. Carlos Fdez also known as Penrider is one of the amazing artists we are showcasing. His medium of choice is graphite drawings which tell often dark and haunting stories.
What is your first memory of being creative? (Project, specific artwork, etc.)
Aside from the children’s drawings, I did a two-page comic of a crazy clown based on Nirvana when I was thirteen.
When do you realize what you were making was art?
When I sold my first work
Do you have any official art training or are you self-taught?
I did some illustration and comic courses but above all, I have dedicated many hours on my own.
What’s the process of creating like for you? Do you have to set the mood? What goes on when creating a new piece?
When something comes to my head I try to make a thumbnail quickly or write a note on the phone before I forget it. Sometimes that’s okay and other times I have to think about it a lot, it’s not always the same.
You do a lot of drawings as well as oil paintings. Is there a medium you prefer and why?
Graphite. You can reach incredible precision. Wet techniques stress me a bit because I don’t master them completely and there is always a part of randomness, drawing with graphite is slow and relaxing.
Where do you get inspiration from? We see a lot of dark visuals in your works including giant insects and other creatures. Do dreams have any influence on your work? Would your work be considered pleasant or a nightmare in your eyes?
One thing is what you want to tell and another is how you tell it, for me the difficult part is “what you want to tell”, simply because sometimes you have nothing to say. The part of “how do you tell it” is more fun, you can use monsters, giants, surreal, mysterious things, etc. Today we are exposed to so many images in a massive way, movies, series, search engines on social networks , advertisements, hundreds of artists, song lyrics.
Sometimes you come up with an idea and when looking for references on the internet you discover that you are not original because it had already occurred to many people before you, not something similar to your idea but exactly what you have thought.
Sometimes I think that maybe I had previously seen that image or idea and I don’t remember it, and my subconscious is tricking me into believing that it is an original idea of mine when it is not, crazy.
I don’t usually remember my dreams, but they leave a sensation that I try to use to inspire myself, my brain works best in the first two hours in the morning
I consider my work as pleasant even if it’s dark, I don’t like unpleasant gore or eschatological images. I always try to make something aesthetically beautiful even if it expresses something harsh.
Could you explain more of the meaning behind the works “Anonymous” and “Enlarged” featured in this show?
Anonimo is inspired by a sense of non-belonging, a kind of emptiness in which the senses disappear and you with them,
a feeling that nobody sees you and life passes through you.
Enlarged talks about personality, which has no meaning outside of society, if a human being lived isolated and only his whole life the concept “personality” would have no meaning for him.
Society exalts who is different in some aspect of their personality that is considered valuable and excludes anyone who violates any of its established rules. Meanwhile the individual struggles to differentiate himself from the rest of the members of this society but needs his approval to make this difference effective and renounces the innate aspects of his individual personality to position himself in the comfortable lap of social acceptance.
The only way to look inside, to see what really exists and grow is to do it in solitude, here is the paradox.
What’s something you hope viewers and collectors experience when viewing your works?
I would like to confuse the viewer, generate doubts and invite them to compose their own story and to participate by putting the missing pieces of the puzzle. What I want is to impress you.
Available Works
Title: Enlarged
Artist: Carlos Fdez (Penrider)
Medium: Graphite on paper
Size: 8.7 x 8.3 (Image area) Inches | 22 x 21 cm
Original: 1/1
Location: Spain
Purchase on our gallery website
Title: Anonymous
Artist: Carlos Fdez (Penrider)
Medium: Graphite on paper
Size: 7.5 x 8.7 (Image area) Inches | 19 x 22 cm
Original: 1/1
Location: Spain
Purchase on our gallery website
Follow Carlos Fdez on Instagram here.
Images © Carlos Fdez
(If you are an artist and would like to be removed from our website simply email us and we will be happy to take down the article. We claim no ownership of any of the images featured, all copyrights go to the artists we feature.)
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