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CAMONZALEZ

2017-02-25 - 2017-04-09

Pablo Sozyone Gonzalez has worked on the line, the shape and the rhythm for over 25 years. Raised with the joy and sense of humor of a loud pack, in a proud spanish family of modest backgrounds fleeing the dictatorship of Franco, Sozyone very quickly feels free to think and do whatever he wants, where he wants in his hometown, Brussels. In 1988 at the age of 15, Sozyone meets his artistic partner Smimooz, together they'll start by tagging everything and anything, whilst writing the first rimes and lyrics of what would become the Hip Hop band De Puta Madre. Within a few years he becomes a reference in the whole belgian kingdom for his music, his texts and his paintings. In 2004, Sozyone makes the jump into galleries presenting 'One Million Murders' (Alice Gallery). Between 2003 and 2013 he concentrates on one concept only : 'La oyoucratie' (the Gangstacracy), portraying the most beautiful specimen of the 'milieu'; the french anarchists in bicycle or in Bmw's, the german terrorists of the 70's, the old-cats on Marseille' docks, the red spaniards, the street gangs of New York, the thief in white gloves of Place Vendôme... A romanticized universe aromatized with poppy and gun powder , where the profile would have a broken nose and fierce eyes. In 2013, Sozyone and Jaba Mathieu join for a 2 years adventure. Between Singapore, Los Angeles and Valencia, they will develop, write and finish 'ENEMIES', a 142 pages hard cover intergalactic graphic novel. (Ankama Editions, oct. 2015) In 2015, Sozyone opens a new chapter: 'The End of The Empire' A heedless universe where the peaceful characters wander in mass, aimless but alive in the core of a cold city awaiting a terror attack or a destructive wave, phone in hand hoping to immortalize the moment whichever it may be. The series 'CAMONZALEZ' describes those moments of ante-apocalypse with camouflage shapes as we all conceal it from observation. 

'When I was 9, I constantly thought about death, I was waiting for the catastrophe to happen, for the accident, the nuclear bomb that would blow up the city, I'd imagined a river of lava, I would see myself running through the ruins of rue Royale and the mutilated bodies of my schoolmates. I'd seen a documentary on Hiroshima, and I said to myself that they must had seen the end of the world, the end of human kind, the end of the universe... But they didn't see it coming. I paint those few moments before the end, the last second, that precise instant where the man, the human is in line with the cosmos.'

interview between Sozyone Gonzalez and Arturo Tortura