Saddo is a romanian artist, illustrator and muralist. Saddo started his artistic career as founder of one of the first Romanian street art collectives, The Playground, in a time when a freshly graduated artist didn’t have other possibilities than to be a graphic designer or a teacher.
What do you want to express with your art? What are your main references?
Since I was a kid I was super fascinated by fantastic stories and myths, scifi movies, and I kinda surrounded myself with this fantasy world, and soon I started creating my own stories and images.
So basically what I’m doing now is creating these escapist fantasies, dressing up my fears and anxieties in beautiful shapes and characters, putting my worries to sleep with fragments of stories. I don’t really think about it that much, I just feel like I have to do this, and most of the time I love doing it. And hopefully my pieces are stimulating or fascinating for other people’s imaginations too.
I’ve been playing with bird images for a while, sometimes it’s a humanoid character with a bird body, or with the body in the shape of a coffin encasing a dead bird. Sometimes a deity with a proud bird head, or a bird with human legs. I haven’t really put a lot of thought in these images, they’re very intuitive, like a recurring character in a dream, that always changes his shape and meaning, but somehow it remains the same.
Lately though I’ve been trying to become a bit more rational, to put a little more thought and creating a backstory for these characters, and this is how I came up with the title and subject for my first solo show “Rise of The Bird People” at Objectos Misturados Gallery, in Viana do Castelo, Portugal.
The show is born from my fascination for stories, scifi books and movies, exploring, traveling, illustrations of exotic plants and birds, images of Conquistadors, paintings of old masters, Islamic miniatures, Renaissance costumes and armors all these aesthetic references, backed by my personal feelings regarding mankind’s history of colonialism, genocide, violence that perpetuates itself throughout history, human’s disregard for environment and other creatures.
Any project currently?
My latest project is a duoshow with my girlfriend Aitch, for La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, Canada. The name of the show is “Coffins”, it opens on August 15th, and it’s up till August 28th.
The idea of the show is pretty simple and it’s born from our experience of moving to Lisbon, being caught by surprise by a humid, rainy, gloomy winter which deeply affected out mood and it even translated into a physical discomfort, a feeling of being trapped inside our house and bodies. This mixed with the fact that one of the recurring elements in both our work, is the coffin, made us decide that the best way to express how we felt, and make the best of it is to base our whole show on this shape and concept.
There’s also a nice twist in the fact that during the time since we developed our concept and sketches, till we actually started working on the pieces, the weather changed, Spring and Summer came, everything got nice and pretty and sunny, so the whole look of our pieces is colorful, filled with patterns, blooming flowers, birds, which is really refreshing, cause it gives the pieces another dimension, a bit of an ironic detached feeling, some quirkiness, some poetry, etc.
All the pieces in the show: http://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/august-2014-3/
For inquiries write to:
Are you represented by a gallery?
No, I’m not, I’ve been collaborating with different galleries, with some of them I had recurring collaborations, but I’m not really represented by a gallery.
You promote your art online?
Yes, of course, I show my art on my personal website, on my Facebook page, Flickr, Behance. There are also blogs and online magazines that feature my work and ask me questions every once in a while, my work has been featured on the online versions of Juxtapoz Magazine, HiFructose Magazine, etc.
http://www.saddo.ro/
https://www.behance.net/Saddo
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saddo/476460159059137
What do you expect from the future?
I just want to get better at what I’m doing, to try to develop from one project to another, to polish my technique and ideas, and to be able to remain creative and come up with stuff that are new and exciting for me.
I’d like to keep showing in nice galleries, have the chance to paint some more murals, meet artists whose work I love.
To have a nice home with Aitch, and travel and explore a lot.
