The pseudonym “Vanilla Royal” is a declaration of my intent to merge two polar worlds: the ordinary (the vanilla flavored) with the spectacle spectacular (royal). I am a multidisciplinary artist examining the boundaries of materials such as plastic, clay, and brass, among others. I seek to create encounters between the virtual and the real, between digital work and handmade work. The result is strange hybrid creatures that connect different languages and cultures; the gothic and the bizarre, comics and manga culture, eastern spiritual tradition and art history.
The colorful world that I create is filled with mythological, religious and new age elements that integrate into indefinable crossbreeds; images and objects that are at once perhaps sweet, perhaps violent. A sculpture of a high-heeled shoe that appears to be an ice-cream cone with a texture of a hand grenade, for instance. The works are manufactured by combining innovative technologies with ancient or traditional techniques. I begin by creating digital sketches (constructs and deconstructs vectors and computerized cut-outs). These I then convert into paintings, sculptures and animations. At times the works are created in ancient techniques, for example, bouquet paintings created using an eastern Christianity method of religious icons than were covered in car lacquer and polished. This process distanced their materiality, as if they were produced by machines. In other examples, the works are created using cutting-edge methods, like the sculpture “Fetish Shoe – third” which was initially crafted by hand using clay, and later scanned and printed using a 3D printer.
Through these work processes I seek to generate a discussion concerning the nature of handmade crafts in the digital age and to reexamine mediumistic principles. While working with brand new technologies, I resurrect the traditional and examine how the substance and visibility of the material form a new language, one that can be termed HD.