Dis Berlin (Mariano Carrera)

Dis Berlin (Mariano Carrera) - Levitations

Artist Biography: Dis Berlin Soria, 1959 Born in Soria in 1959 under the name of Mariano Carrera, Dis Berlin takes his artistic name from a Roxy Music song when he arrived in Madrid in 1982. Music -with authors such as David Bowie-, literature, advertising and classic cinema are the references that placed his work at the forefront of the Madrid art scene in the 80s. His first exhibition in 1982 revealed an author with a profound figurative vision who constructed scenes of great narrative and iconographic force. His paintings in the form of isolated or successive film stills, an effect achieved by dividing the canvas into different scenes, gave him a place of his own in the Spanish art scene. From those years his pictorial collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar's cinematography (La Ley del Deseo, Átame, Tacones Lejanos and Kika) are well known. In the 90's his style becomes more concrete and more personal. The technical keys are the saturated colors and the contrasts between cold and warm tones, as well as his combination of points of view in flat paintings in which the sense of depth is deliberately annulled. In his works, some motifs are threaded with others in a metaphysical reading of his particular personal universe reflected in multiple references that produce fantastic scenes with a marked dreamlike-surrealist air. His imaginary kaleidoscope in the manner of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland combines literary (Ovid, Borges, The Thousand and One Nights), pictorial (Patinir, Corot, Magritte), cinematographic (Fellini, Walt Disney, the Coen brothers) and musical (Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles or Forever Changes by Love) references. Since then, his career has been marked by the themes treated with his particular style. Issues such as the painter's space, the decontextualization of everyday objects, or the circuits that add, unite and relate multiple personal references as a complete personal map. His work for the MAXAM Collection and image for the year 2014 of the well-known explosives calendar is a Chemical Circuit in which he captures the different activities, as well as specific products and references to the more than 140 years of history of the patron company. All of these aspects he learned about on two trips he made to the Explosives House at the Museum of Mining and Industry of Asturias (MUMI, www.mumi.es). Dis Berlin's work can be found in museums such as the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), IVAM (Valencia), Artium (Vitoria) or Marugame Hirai (Kagawa, Japan). In addition to painting, Mariano Carrera/Dis Berlin also practices photography and sculpture. His relationship with art is extensive, having also been a gallery owner, editor and curator of exhibitions, work that he currently continues to combine with that of creator.