Pepo Moreno
(Spain)
Pepo Moreno was born in Spain in the last years of what we now call the Millennial Generation. He grew up drawing at his hometown in the countryside and spent his young adulthood flirting with a singer career while pursuing a BA in Communication and Advertising.
Forever an enemy of the closet and a friend to the arts, he moved to ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin, where he gained first-hand experience on how broad the spectrum of queerness could really be. It was then when his first series of drawings in between the sad, the gay and the ugly blossomed.
Today Pepo lives in Paris, and his paintings have grown to become both a mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes in Western pop culture. On the superficial –the aesthetics–, his work explores a myriad of saturated colours using different variations of acrylic painting techniques. Deep down –at heart– it embraces some of the contradictions of the modern queer life experience: from the sheer gayness of being out, proud and simply alive, to the forever young, forever beautiful obsession that often hides the loneliness and isolation of being an outcast.