Pepo Salazar (*1972, born in Vitoria-Gastéiz, Spain, lives and works in Paris)

​

Spanish artist Pepo Salazar’s body of multimedia work is characterised by an experimental and rebellious attitude and bears the influence of punk culture and its iconoclastic imagery. The Spanish artist works with various media, including installations, assemblages, soundscapes, collages and performances. His style is less defined by its form than by its attitude: an anti-aesthetic, radical directness. Salazar is one of three artists that curator Martí Manen selected for the exhibition in the Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

​

In the artistic avant-garde tradition, Salazar casts a critical eye on social phenomena such as the influence of mass media and consumer culture. Working with various materials (video, sound, metal, glass, fluorescent tubes), he creates spaces filled with contents in which numerous layers of information overlap. The artist consciously uses this method to create confusion. In many of his works, he processes linguistic systems inspired by contemporary philosophy. The result is an intelligent play on words and their meanings. The use of cheap throwaway objects gives Salazar’s assemblages a direct, raw and coarse character.

​

“Pepo Salazar has made a condensed piece, with layers and layers of material and information, with no need to seek a narrative but working in an almost linguistic manner. And once again it’s advanced politics, outside what we traditionally know as politics. It’s about consumption, a typology of content, of mixing references and moments with no holds barred; it’s about generating a situation not to be understood so much as to be noted, which is extremely brave.”

– Martí Manen (interview mit Manuel Segade in www.a-desk.org, June 2015)