To Whom That May Concern.

± Writing as Painting ± the Text as Image ± ie ± Painting as Writing ± the Image as Text ±

European Visual Artist Mj Tom chooses not to share any personal information. Since 2003 he established the Visual Poetry | Urban Art Group LosOtros with his alter ego, Andrea Nada. He lives between Berlin, Barcelona and Paris.
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His work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona.
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His current body of work includes mixed media, collage, sculpture, installation, and digital printing. Irreverent and fleeting, able to define himself as a copy machine of art, sarcastic and deliberately anonymous, he questions almost every probable fact. The veneer of normality, the history as written, the common way of understanding nature and oneself as a part of it.
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As he remarks “I don’t want much to be known “about me”. I am not trying to be elusive as some people might say. I just think what is important is the artwork, not the artist. I want you to have my work on your …wall, not based on who I am, where I have studied or where I have exhibited my work. I don’t want to get between “You” and the “Artwork”. I want to live quietly behind it… and pass away sometime quietly…”
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Adding that “We are low value with high purpose. We are dedicated to non-educational activities, self-indulgent thoughts, unfinished and incomplete actions. Our work is not easily classified or marketable. This protects us from analysis, judgment or criticism. We have no direction, motivation other than a cursed reflex to purge our anonymous mental overflows in a public forum and then run away from it and hide behind our cloak of concealment. Art is simply our lifestyle.”.

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± Painting as Writing ± Image as Text ±

[Curriculum Vitae on My Own Words]

There is no Reality | Until You Create One. Art is my way to conciliate with reality. In some cases, I can bring it closer to my standards. And psychoanalysis too. Both of them are hopeless. It is a try to put an order in the hectic world around and inside me. To value better what had happened and possibly what is happening, at least a part of it. It is a lost war. Before I can understand what had happened in reality, or at least what I perceive as reality, the latter flips and turns to something else. I‘m a witness, an eye witness. I revise meticulously what is around me. I examine, select, collect, put in order emotions. Stating what is important and what is not, what could be regarded as beautiful, or ugly, what would be funny or sad. If I can’t change it, I can barely transform it, good enough in order to compromise with it. Sometimes the attempt is successful, sometimes it isn’t. I‘m urban. I like nature but I feel comfortable only in the city. It is my battlefield. Especially, after hours, when everybody sleeps so I can walk quietly in the streets and hear the sounds. My paints are made for me, but in reality, they refer to others. It is an attempt; to speak enough for me but not in a verbal way. What is entitled inside the frame, presuppose my aesthetic viewpoint. But what they produce is beyond my control. I exist in both of them. It is a miracle when it happens. Unfortunately isn‘t an everyday experience. Or, I believe so.

My Reality | Ιn Halftones. My work is an exploration of paradoxes and contrasts which are torturous and utopian, wild and serene but definitely resilient. As my reality is in halftones, I capture fragments of life often ignored or forgotten.

My art echo’s the unease and mixes it with the uncomfortable reality of continuous transformations of the urban environment in which I live. Faces, pseudo familiar situations, characters belonging to various walks of life… they all inject emotions with such a warm identity to characterize the experience of ordinary people, those people who would say and tell through the eyes their own existence.

Ι represent ordinary people; those actors unaware of being protagonists of present days and to represent them in spite of a reality in half-tone that essentially results in a kind of summary, which, in the end, is life! An arrested motion in time.

In arresting motion there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality, so I don’t arrest motion in time. I make it. I love my subjects although I don’t know them. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met any of them or I don’t know them at all, yet I live through them, or I can’t live without them.

They constitute my curriculum vitae.