The impossible cities of Cinta Vidal

In the caption that appears at the bottom of my articles it is expressly written that I am fascinated by anything that can take me out of reality, and often this "exit" is immediate, just a glance at a drawing, a line from a book, a scene from a movie, it's love at first sight. So I want to introduce you to an artist that I discovered this summer during a trip to Spain, whose works enraptured me at first sight: Cinta Vidal.

Cinta Vidal Agullo (https://cintavidal.com/) is a steet artist from Barcelona, who articulates her production between illustrations, large murals and oil paintings. Her murals are scattered all over the world, many of them are in Barcelona, the United States and Japan, and her paintings, oil on canvas or on wooden supports, have been the subject of several exhibitions and shows, some of them exclusive.

But what is about her style that struck me? Think about it, what is that element that distinguishes and above all binds our way of life, the environment that surrounds us, the actions-reactions we cause, the effort we put in? One thing that we unconsciously and obviously take for granted, the lack of which would really upset everything: gravity.

What distinguishes the production of this artist is precisely the absence of gravity, or, in an even more complex way, the presence of "many" gravities. In fact, we see two types of illustrations: the first in which the subjects, often objects of daily life, but also houses and cities, float freely in the air, sometimes not just flying but intersecting to set up complex shapes. Cinta Vidal herself has stated that this is her way for elevating objects, giving them a new importance.

The second kind of works, the one I prefer, deals instead with buildings and environments that intersect on different floors, each floor is a "world" itself, with its own law of gravity, each floor is inhabited by people, animals, objects, which are visually in contact with their counterparts on other floors, but without interacting or mixing, as if they ignored each other respectively. So the wall of a house is at the same time the terrace of another house that lives "rotated" of ninety degrees, and the terrace of this will be a wall in a third "dimension" and so on. In my opinion, this multidimensionality of the elements finds one of its highest points in the gutters and drainpipes of the houses, which connect even though they come from different and opposite planes, creating a strong nonsense effect.

Over the years the artist has proposed a wide range of settings and architectural styles, for each of which she has exploited the typical elements to create connections always surprising, we find in her drawings modern buildings, industrial, medieval, futuristic, expressions of building typical of different parts of the world.

Through this non-interaction between worlds that are actually fused together, the artist wants to bring attention to the isolation of the individual and the lack of communication that we often experience, an aspect that is very evident in the paintings that show interiors, where the characters who live there "coexist" in different daily actions coming to brush against each other, but without ever really interacting, remaining "on their own" in their gravitational plane.

Looking at these works, it is very easy to think of the famous "Relativity" by Escher, also called "the impossible stairs", and contextually to one of the best scenes of another masterpiece: the movie "Labyrinth" with David Bowie and Jennifer Connely (if you were born in the '80s you know very well what I'm talking about, otherwise you know very well what to watch tonight).

Having been very impressed by the drawings of Cinta Vidal, I myself have tried to make sketches or reproductions with Lego inspired by her style (read my first article to understand what I'm talking about: https://www.ilmiosalotto.com/post/fuggevoli-sculture-di-plastica-per-moderni-peter-pan-1?lang=en ) finding it very difficult to understand where to start to "weave" the environments. You could start with a cube and develop on all faces, or start with two "opposite" houses and extend. So I leave you with a little challenge: why don't you try to illustrate a multi-world like the ones described? Try to reproduce any element that is familiar to you using this style, and send us your work at info@ilmiosalotto.com, we will publish them on the Facebook page of ilmiosalotto.

Come on, all it takes is a pencil to get out of reality!

Pictures Copyright: Cinta Vidal – cintavidal.com – @cinta_vidal