© MIAZBROTHERS
1. When you take out the detail, all you have left is colour and a somewhat familiar shape, which you assume is a portrait of someone. What is the significance of this?
The point is that you have to assume…we are not interested in the portrait itself,its more like a tailor that is using his mannequin to create his creations, we are using the portrait as a shape to represent the whole humankind in general…its a pretext to work from the philosophical point of view in which we are committed from already 25 years.. is a way to express our idea of ourselves as humans, sensible to the environment, to the experiences, continually evolving and adapting. taking out the details the eye cannot consume the picture as it is used to in a daily basis. you re forced to pause and think and create by yourself an image, a resemblance. we think it is the essence that is important to retain. and when you think about the essence of things it can become a mystical-philosophycal pause awakening the sensitive parts of ourselves that are asleep due to the overwhelming visual information we are fed every moment of the day.a pause to doubt about something can be good.
2. The same technique/style is shown over and over again for different portraits. What message are you trying to transmit, and what is its significance in today’s world?
Fundamentally we are interested about the ¨perception¨ and not the ¨representation¨… its in straight relationship with the use of the senses and the self capacity of elaborate the incoming informations that nowadays should be more and more important …its kind an exercise for the inner spirit….a flexible experience of stretching the awareness of what we see and perceive….a stimulation for the consciousness and the limits of our idea of the world and his symbols…
we are trying to force the viewer to interact with the image and to do a sensitive effort by filter it trough the perception and the process of identification to achieve something not fixed and limited but boundless and personal…
today more then ever before, we re able to get all the information we need about everything ,that means that today we can evolve faster. we are able to develope ourselves in infinite ways. we can also be more conscient about ourselves and our choices we have all the means to become a better person. what may be overlooked today are the inner "parts" of ourselves the ones that link us to nature to our origins. to achieve a sort of balance between our mystical nature an the one that have to survive in the material world is the goal. so the paintings are indicating a sort of hidden dimension , the essence of a being that is composed by infinite possibilities, choices, experiences....
3. How did you develop your style? What was its point of origin?
Its an extensive exploring process…both theoretical and practical…we passed trough every medium we where able to experiment with, trying to find which was the most suitable for our nature and philosophical interests….at some point we felt the urgency to do something with painting that after all is the most practiced medium since our adolescence…we conceived the fundamental concept of erasing the lines to gain a flowless mouvement of colours and by just apposing millions of dots apparently dissociates from each other to form something not instantly evident but visible from a furthest distance…
the visual idea came from the necessity to represent the concept that we are a bunch of atomic particles in continuos evolution that never stops…for that reason we couldn’t trace lines and boundaries on the canvas cause that would freeze the image forever erasing the sensation of expansion and evolution…
we wanted to use painting as a challenge, for it is the most ancient and nowadays accesible way to do art ... and spray is just the right medium as the infinite dots that compose the picture are a perfect symbolization and a pretty good way to visualize the numberless particles that phisically we are composed of, the interaction with the external inputs, the hidden chemistry between our concient and subconcient parts , the sensitive, emotional factors that influence our being. so our style was developed accordingly to the philosophycal thoughts of ours.
4. How does this work develop as a brotherhood and a partnership?
we were lucky enough to be raised as equals although there are 3 years between us. and life teached us in the good way and also in the bad way (that is the most effective) that the most precious thing to have is someone that you know like yourself and that you can love and trust with your life…
5. How would you describe them?
…like a couple of friends that respect each other and share the same amazement about everything around with a common vision about collaboration,research,play,sacrifices and some hopes…
6. What is Anti Matter about (2013 series)?
…the antimatter series are an association of scientific and philosophical issue…in one side we wanted to take advantage of the idea that we are not close entities in a close universe and to achieve that we wanted to elaborate a different kind of technique and approach of the painting respect the established course of history of art…and in the other part we underline the necessary response to the increasing tendency of the materialistic compulsion that is spreading in every aspect of life…from art to science…we are trying to regain a consciousness of the sensible,the subtle,the spiritual,the ethereal…
7. Are these originals of yours or works/images that you have adapted/worked over?
…it depends, we don have an established behavior…in case of the most abstract ones like the ¨ghosts¨ we begin to explore around until the picture define itselfs alone…and sometimes depending of the impression we want to present we have to get inspiration from pictures…
8. How do you feel about your audience feeling discomfort at not being able to see art in ways they or their eyes expect to see/read it?
…its not really discomfort what we try to transmit,its more an invite to feel something more than what is brought to you by a detailed image like would be an iper-realistic painting or a photography where all is consumed instantly,swallowed and trashed in the personal memory without letting us be part of the process,but just passive spectators…and there is a more important thing about…when you look at a detailed picture, once you have did the tour and you had consume it, you scarcely need to look furthermore again…once you know it,you lose interest in it…
we try to give the opposite experience…since the picture is not catchable the eye is going back to the painting frequently to try to grab something in vain consequently it remain always interesting and intriguing…or at least that was our goal!!:)
9. As part of your series, you have a very diverse range of muses…from your dear departed (The Ghosts), friends, Kwaii philosophers, masters etc. Why these people? And what do they mean to you?
…like we said, its just a artifice to experiment different compositions of coloured spots to interact with the feelings of the viewer…when we choose a subject its a matter of aesthetics,colours and composition of the canvas…nothing more...
10. What significance are numbers (e.g. philosophers), or are they an attempt to label/title your work in a banal way?
yes, we try to ignore the title and banalize it to let the work float alone by hitself and not giving the public any help...any reference then the vision...
11. How important is memory to you? And how do you explore this in your works, and the experience of them?
yes, in our work there are issues about the historical memories that we found more important and interesting than the personal ones…we took inspiration and studied a lot from the art of the past
especially from the classic philosophers and from the masters of the renaissance…but to talk more precisely about our paintings, its interesting the fact that its up to the viewer if the image is vanishing or is coming forth or its a stop motion that stay in the middle of two directions beetwen the past and the future… like the ¨ the vase is half empty or is half full¨…..
12. Why portraiture? And what is it about portraiture that is so transitory for you?
…because in the way we depict it ,portraiture is a simbolical door to represent the whole human kind with everything that is concerning it...and not just a specific caracter... but a "being" that is in countinuos transformation ...
13. Is it true that you restrict your colour palette (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow)? If so, why?
To be the more essentialist possible…and to play with those tree colours in the most difficult and interesting way …we obtain every colour we would like just adding the tree primary colours in multiple layers with sensitivity and patience adding black and white for the tones and obtaining ¨living colors¨much more sensibles at the light than a prepared colour because the micro dots are interacting individuallly in a ¨nebulas¨ of chromatic particles…and you can prove the experience with our paintings,when they are affected from the daily change of the light, from the morning to the evening, its incredible how many variations could be seen on the canvas…
14. In the past, you’ve said, "We look to provide a visual experience…that activates our awareness, that compels the viewer to recognise and re-establish the limits of his or her own perception, to regain control of the real.”
What do you mean when you say that you want to regain control of the real?
Basically that to be able to see something you are missing you should have a rest or some sort of different approach and sometimes we tend to miss the real around us...and could be not what its seems to be…like the relativity of perception that depend of the point of view of each one…if you train something that you are not used to, like in this case, do a little effort of perception, maybe you discover to appreciate things in a new way and consequently to think different…