Artist Feature: Kike Congrains

Happy Sunday lovely readers. I'm actually making good on what I said and posting today. Can you believe it? I know, me neither.

The weather here in London is definitely on the up but it's still pretty grim so I wanted to choose an artist to help cut through the grey with some goddamn sunshine. Kike Congrains seemed like a pretty great antidote and hopefully you will agree.

Kike hails from Peru, a place I'm pretty desperate to go, that in my head is full of incredibly old and colourful history. Admittedly, I am going to be very biased towards Kike's work. Not just because his work seems to call upon old belief systems ( a favourite motif of mine) but because I too would consider myself a collage artist. Whilst I do a lot of ink drawing and recently fell back into a watercolour habit if I have time for collage, it's the art form I love most.

Lucky for Kike and I collage is pretty fashionable right now, but it's nearly always simplistic photo collage. Which whilst often quick and effective, in my opinion, can often lack warmth. Kike has said in interviews being in contact with the materials is important to him and I couldn't agree more. Whilst his work features magazine cutouts, it's the textured papers, careful cutout work, and adventurous colour scheme that gives their illustrations such brilliant interest.

Because paper collage is such a physical act seeing the tiny cutouts before they are combined on a page, or watching how a background comes together without foreground detail can be particularly impressive. And Kike knows that. Which is a seriously good thing because it means he often posts little work in progress shots over on his Behance and tumblr.

I hope you feel just as enthusiastic as I do about Kike and collage based illustration, because I seriously hope 2018 is the year it moves a little more into the forefront of what's fashionable right now in the illustration world.