Press

Design student François Chaïyason interviews Pocobelli

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Have you been interested in art since your childhood?

Yes, I was first introduced to art when my parents took me to the Vatican at 6 years old. On that same trip I started collecting postcards of Italian mosaics and buying small space Lego sets. I also received the stamp collection of my late Italian grandfather, whom I never knew. In a lot of ways, my aesthetic sensibility was formed during this time and has remained fairly consistent until today. I still make drawings of old space Lego boxes and stop in my tracks when I see a postcard showing a bird in a mosaic. I was also an obsessive trading card and comic collector. I would stare at these objects for hours on end when I was a teenager.

How have you developed your career? Was it something that just happened or did you make strategic decisions?

It’s all been strategic decisions, although luck plays a role. Unless you're rich or well connected, there’s no real easy path to becoming an artist. I come from a small city in Canada—Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—so I’ve spent most of my adult life pursuing opportunities to make my name. You really have to be determined. I first moved to Montreal, and then to Toronto, and five years ago I moved to Berlin, where I’m very happy to be based. Persistence and a ‘never give up’ attitude is crucial.

That all being said, at the end of the day, it’s about the work, and there’s nothing that can improve your odds more than making great work. Nevertheless, I believe art should be treated as a business like any other, which means having an entrepreneurial mindset. Luck alone is rarely enough.

How did you came up with the idea of making "Galatea"?

That’s part of my Screen Memories series where I take well known paintings and cover up areas with digital shapes and fills. The idea originally started a couple of years ago with basic fills that I would add on top of screenshots of famous paintings using my iPhone. As the project developed over time, I began to add and remove some of the layers in Photoshop, which created a strange mix of organic and inorganic shapes, and over time, I’ve refined the method. 

From a conceptual point of view, Galatea is a tribute to the women in my life who all seem to be working so hard to keep their families and their jobs going, while also maintaining their health. It’s an image of a triumphant, powerful femininity, so it seemed appropriate. I use a lot of Raphael’s work because of his unparalleled use of colour as well as his rich compositions. To see Raphael’s work in person really is an otherworldly experience, and I recommend it to everyone. To have a full understanding of art requires an encounter with Raphael. It’s real-world magic.

Further, I see the history of art as a dialogue among artists. And to be a part of the tradition, you have to be in conversation with the tradition. If you read Chaucer or Blake, you’ll find endless references to other writers and the history of ideas. This is part of what makes them great artists. So, I directly reference art history in order to enter that conversation. 

Is there an artwork that you are most proud of? Why?

One of my favourite pieces is Car Ad #2, which is one of my very early iPhone works from 2016. This showed me that the phone could be a serious tool for art making. I love David Hockney, but I think the phone has far more capabilities than acting as a kind of virtual paintbrush. It’s more akin to a sampler to make hip hop and techno, and I treat it that way.

Otherwise, it’s usually whatever I’m working on. I’m always trying to get better and develop new breakthroughs. It’s important to try and do things that are slightly out of your reach because you achieve this goal more often than you might think—maybe 20% of the time—and that’s pretty good.

On most of your art, you use red and yellow paint, what is the story behind your choices?

Those colours happen to work well with a lot of the paintings that I paint over. It’s primarily an aesthetic decision, although sometimes, say in the case of the red Caravaggios, there’s a symbolic overtone.

Who are your biggest influences?

My biggest influences are writers. I wrote my master’s thesis in English literature on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which is an experimental novel. Interestingly, Ballard’s biggest influences were visual artists, primarily the Surrealists, so it’s full-circle in a sense. The psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna also had a big influence on me—he has a mixed legacy, but he reminds us in a very persuasive and insightful way that we basically have no idea what’s going on. This is very important and something we easily forget.

What is your scariest experience in your professional life?

The sense that you may have screwed up your life. That feeling when you wake up at 3 am and think, “Have I made a huge mistake?” Things have been going well recently, so I don’t have that feeling as often, but sometimes you wonder. Pursuing the artist’s path will test your soul...repeatedly. In a sense, it can be a massive sacrifice of one’s life, depending on how things turn out.

What is your dream project?

I’ve never thought of it before, but doing something in the Vatican, which I consider to be a kind of temple to the mind. That would be the pinnacle.

What is the best piece of advice you can give to an artist just starting out?

Focus on one thing at a time. If you have a part-time job, do your art first before your other work. Be practical—think of who might buy your work from the beginning. This can actually improve your work. And put in the hours — don’t worry about failure — the road to success is paved with failure. The important thing is that you put in the time and stay focused.

Panel: 'NFTs for Beginners' with Siemens Arts Program

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Special thanks to the team at Siemens Arts Program for the opportunity to speak on NFTs and the future of digital art. The discussion was broadcast live on Twitter and can be seen below.

Interview questions from design student Quinton Delcourt

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Quinton Delcourt is a design student from France who is taking a six-month course in Berlin. As part of his assignments, Quinton interviewed a local artist.

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Quinton Delcourt: Where are you from?

Adrian Pocobelli: I’m from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is in Canada’s midwest. After that I moved to Montreal for eight years, and then I lived in Toronto for four years before moving to Berlin.

QD: What was your first job? What did that bring to you?

AP: My first job was working in a comic store. I spent so much time there they finally just gave me a job. I spent a lot of my early teenage years just staring at comic covers in my bedroom — I would lay them all out in a row and just stare at them. Then I would rearrange them and stare at them some more. This had a big impact on me — I consider many comic covers to be as interesting as many modern paintings. The covers were very important to comics — as Stan Lee said, 90% of sales in the 1960s were based on the cover.

QD: How did you know you were going to make art?

AP: I visited the Vatican when I was 6 years old and during the trip I started collecting postcards of old Roman mosaics of birds, the kind you might find in Ravenna. That was the first thing I ever collected. I just loved to stare at them. I kind of knew then that this is where I would focus.

QD: When did you start making art?

AP: Since I was a kid — once in a while I would copy a Leonardo landscape, for example, at a pretty young age. For a few years when I was a teenager I wanted to become a comic artist, but I always kind of knew I wanted to do something visually poetic, so I gravitated back to visual art.

QD: How are you working? What are your inspirations?

AP: I generally make compositions using drawing apps on my phone, and then I find ways of reproducing the work in the physical world — often I’ll print on canvas or paper and paint on top of it with acrylic paint.

My main inspirations are writers, J.G. Ballard, the great British Surrealist writer who wrote Crash, and Terence McKenna, who I consider to be one of the most imaginative philosophers of the 20th century, even though he gets very little respect from academia. As far as artists are concerned, I quite like Richard Prince’s recent work, and David Hockney is always interesting.

QD: When and why did you move to Berlin?

AP: I went to Berlin to pursue my artistic vocation. In Canada it’s very difficult if you don’t go to the right art schools — maybe that’s true everywhere. I’ve had a few solo shows at project spaces since I moved here three years ago, so the city has been good to me.

QD: What are the advantages in Berlin for art ?

AP: There’s an active community of people who are enthusiastic about art here — most of them artists — and you get some world class contemporary art galleries here — all with fairly affordable rent, although that’s changing all the time. I consider Berlin the last affordable art capital in the Western world, which is why I’m here. I’m also a fan of German electronic music, which had a big influence on me when I was younger. I appreciate the German spirit.

QD: What is the message in your art?

AP: I’m trying to do visual philosophy when I make art. In a sense, the last thing I’m interested in is drawing from a model or painting an outdoor landscape. My biggest concern is juxtaposing iconography from our shared visual vocabulary. I believe that associating visual ideas that are far apart can produce new ways of thinking and give bigger perspectives on reality.  In a sense, it’s in the Surrealist tradition, based on Lautreamont, of fusing two opposite realities in a new context, but pushed further.

QD: I see you use nearly the same color palette, but I see an evolution in your work. Can you talk to me about that?

AP: I’m very intuitive when it comes to colour. I’ve been told I mix a lot of hot and cool colours, which I find a little bit amusing. I don’t even think about colour in those terms. I think my use of colour is one of the things that makes me most unique — I also think a bit of my Italian heritage comes out in my palette. It’s all intuitive.

QD: Moreover you play with typography, different sentences or mathematical formulas. Can you talk about that also?

AP: Yes, this is an example of the visual philosophy that I was talking about. The Surrealists took the content of external reality and mixed and matched it in unusual and inspired ways, while often distorting the scale. I’m applying this logic to the screen, mixing words, images and number — math, symbolic logic, computer code, etc. — every signification system that I can think of — and juxtaposing them.

QD: Do you have any other things you want to tell me?

AP: I believe it’s important to focus on the things that make you and your imagination unique. In other words, embrace your uniqueness and sail full speed into your imagination.

QD: Thank you so much!