Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is one of the most famous contemporary gigantomaniac artists. This Cuban travels around the world and creates in all its corners huge portraits of people.
He is the founder of the modern movement of Culture Jamming in New York and an innovator in the international art scene in the cities.
Since the late 1990s, he has replaced the faces of the pop symbols chosen by advertisers for the faces of anonymous, unknown people to question methods of behavior in public places, defined by “patterns” to follow and to change the type of events that have already been preserved in collective memory. The unique guide developed by Rodriguez-Gerad was mentioned in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo and became the predecessor used by many authors of anonymous portraits now common in street art.
Recently in Beirut, Lebanon, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada (featured) completed a mural entitled “Connection” with support from BAD (Built by Associative Data). The wall now (commissioned by Beirut Digital District) features a young boy exploring an electric circuit board, touching on the need for innovation and education in building a better future for the country. Taking a full ten days for the Cuban-American artist to complete, the piece deftly navigates various architectural elements to spread across the structure.
Jorge did not economize on acrylic: yes, this material is short-lived, but even in our world everything is so unsteady, especially human life. Here are the works of Jorge: today we see a portrait on the billboard, and tomorrow it will rain, and no one will remember the name of the person from the picture. However, not always the artist portrays little-known or fictitious people.
As a young boy, Jorge, after moving with his family to the States, seriously took a great interest in drawing. And it became for him not just a hobby, he spent all his free time on painting. And already in the senior classes I knew for sure: this is his vocation. Now Jorge Rodriguez Gerada is one of the most famous contemporary artists.
Traveling in the world, he has already left his portraits-giants in many European countries: in the squares, on the hot sand of the beach in Catalonia and next to the seaport. By the way, Gerada has always been against the commercialization of art. Jorge is one of the founders of the partisan art group “Nuisance Culture”, which fights trends and fashion trends in art. They, in fact, set the style of modernity, and in fact they are based on the desire for enrichment.
