Who is Spanish contemporary artist Isidro Ferrer?
Career of Isidro Ferrer
Isidro Ferrer was born in Madrid in 1963, studied Dramatic Art and Scenography and specialized in mime and pantomime. For a few years, he combined performance, scenography and acting in different theater companies until an accident during a tour took him off the stage. He started working at Heraldo de Aragón in Zaragoza as a layout artist in 1988. A year later he moved to Barcelona for a one-year internship at the atelier of graphic designer Peret. The period he spent as an apprentice of graphic designer Peret in Barcelona was a key moment in his professional career. In 1991, together with three other professionals, he founded the Camaleon design studio in Zaragoza. In 1996 he moved to Huesca where he set up his own studio, dividing his work between poster design, editorial design and illustration, artistic direction of exhibitions and some animation series, mainly for advertising purposes. Drawings for the newspaper El Pais and for the Santillana and Alfaguara publishing houses, continuity cloths for Canal Plus, the graphic image of the centenary of Luis Buñuel, a line of games for BD Ediciones de Diseno and the television spot for the New Volkswagen Beetle are some of his most recent works. Currently, he has been working mainly in editorial design, posters and illustration. Throughout his career, his projects have received several important awards. Among his most outstanding awards we find a National Award for the best illustrations, it was from that moment on that Ferrer's work began to reach a wider audience. His most outstanding works are the Centro Dramático Nacional, the graphic project for the centenary of Luis Buñuel and his work for the newspaper El País.
Isidro Ferrer: What are the characteristics of works of art?
Isidro Ferrer plays with objects to create new visual messages that represent new ideas and concepts of all kinds. The creation of his Frankenstein is the main strength of his work where, through the nexus between objects, unique works are achieved that he later uses in his design projects. Materials, objects and being able to touch matter through construction is something fundamental in his work, being one of the main characteristics that identify him as a unique designer, leaving the digital world a little aside. With a great personal passion, Isidro Ferrer shows us a magical world of visual poetry where we get involved in the deception of objects in a smooth and delicate way. Using modified objects to create something new that conveys a different message, but with the essence of what it was in the beginning, it tells this message in a poetic way without forcing the object, but encouraging it to be something else, something unique.
Between reality and fantasy
His work is based on the similarity with other realities, to create that connection from another reality where through our perception capacity we can understand and recreate it in our mind. It uses farce, deception, seduction and the construction of unreality in the visual message to manage to show us an alternative reality that attracts us by its visual force. The most used material in his work is wood, a noble material that allows its modeling to create new realities. In this case, we can see how Ferrer created characters from his imagination using wood.
