At Contemporary Istanbul 2014, the largest international art fair in the Near East region, you can see the artworks by Felipe Cardeña | Savina Gallery booth #IKM302

The activity of urban art by Felipe Cardeña & Cardeña Street Boys intensifies. Between October and November 2014, two murals have arisen in two different areas in Milan.
The first is a “combo” made ​​in the “Gardens Community in Transit” in Montello Street (a green area subtracted from the degradation by neighborhood association) together with pop artists Tomoko Nagao, Domenico Pellegrino, Max Ferrigno and Stefano Gentile.

The other mural is made ​​during “Geotag 2”, the second edition of public art event curated by Christian Gangitano in the multiethnic area around Padua Avenue with the Council of Area 2 and Crespi Committee: the streets involved in the decoration of the walls are Thermopylae Street, where stands a large mural by Felipe Cardeña & Street Boys along with Tomoko Nagao, Marco Aurelio Street, where there is a large fresco by Bros and Sonda, Crespi Street and some adjacent streets.

In Thermopylae Street, Felipe Cardeña and Cardeña Street Boys have restored the first wall began last year, during the first edition of Geotag, which represented the face of Antinous (the favorite of the Emperor Hadrian and one of the male sex symbol of the ancient Rome), surrounded by a classic backdrop floral characteristic of the Cuban artist. Then they continued the work with another mural, this time hosting a figure more “pop”, a big Superman with four hands, always surrounded, of course, by the magic floral “Cardeña world”.

The mural has already been quite successful among the inhabitants of the neighborhood, and also the well-known musician Giovanni Allevi has come on Thermopylae Street to be filmed in front of the face of Antinous, created by Felipe & Cardeña Boys.

Somebody will say that it’s just the «lifting» of memory that makes your past unforgettable, effacing troubles and enhancing only your best recollections, that warm your heart. And yet that’s not the case of Felipe Cardeña gardens. For me, they are a kind of time machine. His floral aquariums – it’s not by chance if the first non-flower to appear in his collages was a lost and frightened little fish! – are the background of the Sixties, of «my» Sixties. Or better, of the second half of the Sixties. To be even more exact, of the last years of the second half, that’s to say almost of the Seventies. They are the flowers of the Flower Children, printed on my first real necktie (still a boy tie, but without the rubber band), the one my father bought me just in the years when I was sliding into my «mangiadischi» (a portable record player with a slot-in mechanism) A Whiter Shade of Pale, by the British band Procol Harum, in the Dik Dik Italian cover: I went into rapture when I could take a glance at one of the rare Beatles photos I was able to get, or at the sleeve of the LP collection of their Oldies.

On the sleeves of the 45 rpm records, in the illustrated magazines of the time, and even in the ads of Carosello (but only the «younger» ones), there were always bunches of flowers: designed, cutout, printed on shirts, embroidered on jackets, or put in the hair. At last, flowers had arrived even on the necktie, that I slipped over my head, not to undo the knot. Me too, at last I had something beat, hippie, rock on me: when you are a child, you are just mixing up things. I had become if not a real flower child, at least a supporter, I had a share in that world of peace, love, colours and tattoos, long hair and beads, smiles, music and thoughtlessness that I believed could last forever. That for me was real life, not a moment of it.

I still have the necktie, but the world it opened to me, is gone.

It survives only in revivals, that cyclically amputate it – psychedelia in music and graphics, in low waisted-jeans and exposed navels – in artistic quotes, in sociological essays that identify it as a period of time sometimes to be forgotten, sometimes to be regretted.  But the spirit that was animating it, the wind that was blowing on everything, that everyone was breathing (and so did I), is no longer blowing. Now to me it doesn’t matter to understand why it happened, whether it was only a naive illusion, an utopia, or whether in the end the power overcame imagination, whether freedom and revolution ideals had been destroyed by drugs, whether the dream did crush at Woodstock or had already vanished while the Rolling Stones were writing You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Anyway, I’m sure I never felt it again. I’m sure that I grew up treasuring in my heart more than in my mind the memory and the warmth of a positive wave. Perhaps hoping, unconsciously, that something could lit it again… and that one day my necktie would be of use again, sooner or later.

Felipe Cardeña awakened that world, that emotion again.

His collages, and above all his flowers, but also citrus fruit, vegetables, camouflaged animals among gardenias, peonies, azaleas and myosotis, are a gust of that wind that blew in 1967 and got up to us. They are flowers planted in the Summer of Love, with the soundtrack of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, and they are blossoming forty years later. They are the children of the magic bus of the Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey, with a stoned Neal Cassady at the wheel (that inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) and of the psychedelic Rolls Royce limo of John Lennon; of the Swingin’ London and of the Pink Floyd visionary, of the cotton fabric for kids from which Paul Smith made his floral shirts, that you could buy at clothing boutiques like I Was Lord Kirchener’s Valet in Kings Road, Chelsea, a favorite store of Jimi Hendrix. They are primeval gardens, symbols of the back-to-nature counterculture movement of San Francisco, they are coming back as a background of a world that the Blue Meanies turned more and more gray, as Lennon and McCartney had foreseen in the animated feature film Yellow Submarine, by the producer George Dunning.

It’s almost as if the flowers placed in the barrels of police guns by pacifists, or the flower that a young girl, in the most celebrated picture taken by Marc Riboud, was holding in her hands, standing in front of several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed in Washington DC to block the protest against America’s involvement in Vietnam, had come back to us, and had been pasted on Cardeña canvases of the Hindu period, together with the stylized flower logo of Mary Quant, and the colors of The Fool collective that painted the exterior of the Apple Boutique in London, and the wonders Alice met along her journey in a fantasy world, and the fantastic visions drawn by illustrators such as Mati Klarwein,  John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham and Henry J. Ford, that stimulated the psychedelic culture of the period.

But Felipe Cardeña, somebody could object, was born in 1979, in the so-called Italian «years of lead», one year after Moro’s assassination. Felipe, being a Spanish artist, is perhaps nearer to the movida of Almodóvar than to the Flower Power and the rock meetings, the Human Be-in and hippie communities. (And more than that, he never had a floral necktie, bought and worn while the air resounded with the notes of All You Need is Love.)

But what does it matter? The pacifist meetings against the war in Vietnam, the lyrics of the musical Hair, the university occupations, the tennis game in Blow up, the Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys have gone into the washing machine of Felipe’s memory and have been tumble-dried. Felipe read the Freak Brothers strips by Gilbert Shelton and Poema a fumetti, a comic book by Dino Buzzati; he wandered around with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, among «tangerine trees and marmalade skies» and «cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head», «that grow so incredibly high». He has looked at the collages (and drawings) the Australian artist Martin Sharp made for Oz, and the Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the album sleeves of the Flower Pot Men of Let’s Go to San Francisco and Midsummer Dreaming, the photographs of the Beatles in India, at the side of the Maha­rishi Mahesh Yogi, and Donovan and Mia Farrow wearing flowers wreaths around their necks – and he metabolized all of this.

With his memories and the continuous flow of images, Felipe did what later he did with the scissors. As if they were a tridimensional prolongation of his mind. He has seen, lost, found again, cut, assembled, mixed, pasted them – and the choice of collage was the perfect one – to rearrange everything in a new story.

There’s not an inch free in his works, and yet there’s no chaos. You couldn’t believe it at first sight, but at a more careful glance, you’ll get a totally different impression. And if you let your eyes get nearer to the canvas, free to fly from flower to flower, like bees, you could be swallowed up. Sucked by the beauty of that natural Shangrila, by its peace. There’s harmony, in the landscape. We can hear sitar chords, we can smell perfumes, we can feel the sounds of nature, India, wetness.

Playing with the modern technique of «cut and paste» – akin to «copy and paste» but much more audacious and radical – the gardens of Felipe Cardeña have become a state of consciousness (or of hallucination?), a visual trip, the artistic representation of the lysergic trips prescribed as a treatment by Timothy Leary «to expand human consciousness», and sang by the Jefferson Airplane in White Rabbit, a real hymn to hallucinogens.

Just look at Felipe’s works: his collages are not memory albums, but flashes, fragments of what is beyond the doors of perception (from which the name of the rock band The Doors). They are oneiric postcards, open-eyed dreams, difficult to interpret, as dreams always are. Seemingly simple, but impalpable, unseizable, elusive, as soon as you try to tell them.

At the beginning they were Eden gardens, with flowers and fruit, lemons and beet-roots. Later, little by little, they became inhabited, first by sea creatures, then by Adam and Eve’s offspring. And then those gardens became backgrounds, wings, scenes, where the most diverse characters were moving. Animals, Ladies with the Ermine and fairies wearing burkas, Madonnas and Buddhas, topical people, of yesterday and today, comic-strip heroes and television faces, futurists wearing hat and coat, bolide cars.

And Dark Ladies, as in the exhibition The Black Dahlia, that steals its title from a famous novel by James Ellroy, inspired to the true story of the unsolved Elizabeth Short murder, a wannabe actress that in the post war period was found severely mutilated in Los Angeles, her body sliced in half at the waist. Ellroy developed an obsession with the deep laceration on her face, slashed from the corners of her mouth toward her ears, that made appear Short was smiling, almost mocking at her own gruesome wounds.

Anyhow, women in Cardeña canvases aren’t victims (at least they don’t seem so), but femmes fatales in every respect, leaving the defeated role to the unlucky Elizabeth, to become instead executioners. Bad girls, female killers from the movies or from the crime news, who overthrow the patriarchal order and defy men on their own field, the field of power, of strength, of trick, of cynicism, without a moment’s hesitation to use their charm and beauty in order to manipulate men at their own liking and to reach their aim. They are sisters of Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, who seduces the young insurance salesman to kill her old husband and pocket the money of the «double indemnity»; of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (even though she had her most dramatic and important role at the trial for the murder of her «man», the gangster Johnny Stompanato); they are cousins to Jane Greer, in Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur; to Rita Hayworth in Gilda, with her long gloves and a cigarette in her hand, to Bette Davis in The Letter, to Ava Gardner in My Forbidden Past…

Blonde as Lizabeth Scott, brunette as Joan Bennett or red-haired as Rita Hayworth, stealing from them gestures and hair dressing, in Cardeña works they become noir frames, blossoming in pop screens. Beautiful, nasty women with perfect make-up, silk stockings, smart dresses; they are clever and independent females, (anti)dolls, sweet and troubling, shameless and sure, as Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks, ready to run at a simple whistle of Bo­gart: «You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.»

Anyhow, Felipe is not looking at the cinema, he’s not cutting scenes from movies, to put them on the canvas. He pillages instead the jackets of the American magazines of True Crime of the Twenties, Thirties, Forties and Fifties (which take inspiration from the cinema). Felipe decontextualizes them and plunges them into waters with flowers, vegetables, animals and fruit (perhaps, the victim corpse has been concealed behind the background of gardenias and brooms, anemones and primroses?). Felipe likes better the drawings because they have much more narrative power than photos. They are able to make more evocative the web of references among illustrations, movies and news reports. But be careful: the Spanish artist’s collages, in line with the ones by John Heartfield and George Grosz, who used them as a satirical weapon against the nazis, are also able to interpret reality, to read it again, they are able to be satirical, to admonish and criticize, denounce and be ironic. They offer a different point of view over front page news, as you can see in his drawings in ArsLife.com site.

Therefore, his hippie, psychedelic, colorful, ecological and ecologist, imaginary and fantastic background, becomes an amplifier, it enhances the meaning of the images it frames, rendering their language more straight and provocative: universal; and leading the onlooker to muse, to think as he is shocked by a short-circuit between flowers and figures.

At the same time, the wind of the Sixties that is blowing from his canvases and carries smells and colours up to us, enveloping everything (women with the gun and British uxoricide kings), and revives the power of dreams, reminds us that even behind the darkest and worst moments of life, even behind the most unfair and painful events, there’s always a blossoming flower.

All you need is flower (flower is all we need).

Brightly coloured and very floral, directly inspired by his overflowing collage, Felipe Cardeña inaugurates a new production of fun design objects and clothing, always dedicated to Flower Power, where he proposes a particular aspect of his creative activity: the ability to invade, with its flowers, every nook and cranny of our daily lives, starting with the objects for the home.

Renowned for his lush, colourful floral language (a “meticulously detailed language, as obsessive as a cloistered nun’s daily rosary”, as Vittorio Sgarbi defined it), produced using the collage technique, Felipe Cardeña gives a fresh presentation of a particular aspect of his creative activity for the Salone del Mobile – his flair for invading every nook and cranny of our daily lives with his flowers, starting with household objects.

Back in 2011 in the MISIAD (Milano si autoproduce design) exhibition curated by Alessandro Mendini, at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, Felipe showed a part of his extra-pictorial production – wall clocks, household objects, notebooks, address books, briefcases, but also rather unusual objects, like “artist’s books”, entirely created out of collage, or “artist’s bindings” for collected sets of books. Or certain mysterious ornaments, the so-called “metaphysical objects”, like the “box of deep thoughts”.
In an interview with Aldo Della Vecchia for the Venice Biennale Cuban Pavilion catalogue, Felipe actually said, “I dream of being asked to create a house completely invaded by my flowers, with flowers on all the walls, doors, objects, furniture, rugs and beds, and then flowers sprouting out of the walls, gushing out of the bath taps, bursting out of the wardrobes and windows… And even in the garden, an avalanche of flowers – real, fake, artificial, cultivated, wild, exotic, European, all mixed up together, in an infinite, ever-expanding whirlwind…”

Now he continues his “felipitation” to the domestic world and, in collaboration with the brand Orsorama, has produced a series of pillows and T-shirts, which directly reproduce the themes of his colorful and lush language: a project where, with his unusual language, the artist proposes a “floral reconstruction of the world”, which not only spreads over objects but also all over the surrounding space, almost to the point of creating a fairytale environment, buried under a widespread, omnipresent continuum of flowers, with joyful, eccentric and bizarre overtones.

On Saturday 31 January, 10 p.m. 2015, the uncut version of the short film “Me gusta Soñar – La verdadera historia de Felipe Cardena” will be webcast, for the first time ever, live from the Bienal del Fin Del Mundo, in Valparaíso (Chile). The short is directed by the Italian artist Desiderio and is about the life and work of the mysterious (and controversial) artist of Hispanic origin Felipe Cardeña.
The film will be shown simultaneously in Valparaíso (Chile), in St. Petersburg (Russia) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
and from then on will remain permanently online at the web address:

http://www.desiderio.biz/felipecardena.html

This short film, shot in Cuba by the artist Desiderio – who has now been living for a long time between Italy and Cuba and has already participated in the Festival of Latin American Cinema and in the Havana Biennial – goes over the history of Felipe Cardeña, a versatile and eclectic artist who was referred to by the famous newspaper “Corriere della Sera” as a “mysterious artist in the wake of Banksy’s style“, whose biography is elusive and controversial, and who, after making a name for himself thanks to his collages characterized by a floral background, can boast a participation in two editions of the Venice Biennale. Born in Balaguer, Spain, in 1979, Felipe, a street mime well as an artist, would actually stay for a long time in Havana during his wanderings around the world, as evidenced by this short film.

This short is in fact a hybrid motion picture, halfway between a journalistic documentary and a dreamlike and symbolic reconstruction of the evocative atmosphere of Havana and Cardeña’s work, which traces back the artistic ideas and the performances achieved by Felipe (like the large floral poster which portrays the face of el Che, still hanging on a street in the old town centre, called Havana Vieja), the suggestions of his works, with their atmospheres and colours, and reconstructs the passage across the streets of Havana, through the cross testimonies of the many who have known him or have heard about him: starting from barmen, hawkers, retailers, and street people as well as precisely from the street actors and mimes of the Gigantería, an organization based in Havana that brings together the best talented street artists on the Caribbean island, among whom Felipe would work for a long time.
A personality who, suspended between reality and imagination, becomes gradually exceptional acrobatic, and even – at times – almost fairy-like: if on the one hand some witnesses have the taste of truth (as is the case of some mimes who tell how the artist worked for some time with them, before “suddenly disappearing” without telling anyone), on the other hand others become instead excessive, paradoxical, to the limit of (and beyond) fantasy.

In so doing, we witness the unfolding of the legend of an artist who, even before becoming a protagonist in the art world, had already built his own life as in a strange limbo, suspended between dream and reality, helped in this by the island’s strongly “magic” tone.
As a binder of this reconstruction – by half documentary and by half dream-like and symbolic – of the character of Felipe, the director has chosen a street rapper, named Sicario, a strange modern storyteller who goes to the places where Felipe would leave and where, according to testimony, he would live for a long time.
Finally, the science fiction writer Yoss, a popular character in the literary universe, not just Cuban, repeatedly invited to international festivals and literature conventions, reflects on the ambiguous relationship that has always been established – both in visual art as in literature – between true, likely and real.
The result on the whole is a fun, crazy, overflowing collage of pictures, testimonials, sensations and visions that tell, along with the character Felipe, the taste of an island that, despite the poverty and hardships of its everyday life, goes on living suspended “entre sueño y realidad” (i.e. “between dream and reality”) .

The event is organized for:
Bienal del Fin del Mundo a Valparaíso (Chile)
In collaboration with:
Italian Factory (Italy)
Savina Gallery (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Graphos: Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Cubeart (Cuba)

Kitsch is dead. Felipe killed it.
One moment of silence for the deceased.
Kitsch is born again. Felipe is its father.
A millennium of feasts for the newborn.
Long live Felipe, long live the kitsch.
Long live the spectator.