Mj Tom LosOtros

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. His current body of work includes mixed media, collage, installations and digital printing. His work has been exhibited at London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona.

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.

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 in silence behind it… and pass away sometime softly...”

As he remarks “LosOtros is not an Artist or a group of Artists... LosOtros is a state of mind that engages a number of individuals.. Not only those that create the Art Works, but also those that they try to understand them... We believe that Art is not important because there is an artist behind, but because there is a viewer in front. The meaning behind an Art Work is the meaning that the viewer builds around it. The artist explanation has a very limited value. We don´t want to promote any manifest, nor to convince anybody about anything... We are not in Art to promote ourselves... Art is simply our lifestyle.”

To Whom That May Concern.

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 am a witness, an eye witness. I meticulously revise what it 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 am urban. I like nature, but I feel comfortable only in the city. It is my battlefield. Especially, the After-hours, when everybody sleeps so I can walk quietly in the streets and hear the sounds. My paints they are done 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, presupposes 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, is not an everyday experience. Or, I believe so.

My Reality In 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.

I 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 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.

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www.losotros.eu