Rotring 1, Rotring 2, Rotring 3 – SAWE

Acrylic, spray paint, collage on paper, 21 x 30 cm each paper.

Martí Sawe (b. 1986, Barcelona) has cultivated a prominent career in graffiti since 2001, becoming a key figure in the subculture with his work appearing in exhibitions and on walls worldwide. After graduating from La Massana in 2006 with a focus on illustration, he worked as an illustrator until 2014, when he co-founded the Manson audiovisual studio, dedicating himself to animation. In 2018, following his first solo exhibition in New York, Sawe shifted his focus entirely to painting. His artistic style explores the tension between control and chaos, blending virtuosic details with scribbles, flat colors with textured accidents, and figuration with disfigurement. This dynamic interplay creates images that are at once disorienting and sincere, mirroring his diverse professional journey and the information-saturated context of modern life.

After over 15 years in illustration and animation, Sawe felt compelled to abandon the constraints of precise, direct imagery in favor of playful, experimental aesthetics. His paintings emerge from a process of layering figurative elements, distorting, breaking, and repeating them until they verge on abstraction. Drawing inspiration from a variety of sources—iconic cartoons, bootleg toys, WhatsApp stickers, and other analog or digital ephemera—Sawe engages in a dialog with the canvas where unpredictability becomes the goal. His work reflects the sensory overload of globalization, channeling it into vibrant, rhythmically charged compositions that invite viewers into his creative chaos.