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Lot Essay
Spanning more than two metres in height, Such a Perfect Day is a monumental work by the Spanish artist Javier Calleja. Against a blue backdrop, his wide-eyed protagonist beams out at the viewer, the work’s title inscribed on his t-shirt. His exaggerated hair and features are instantly recognisable, epitomising the whimsical, graphic language that has propelled Calleja to prominence over the past decade. Conceived as extensions of himself, Calleja’s cast of boyish characters capture a complex range of emotions. Here, as in many of his works, his subject’s eyes glisten with water, as though a smile has just broken through after crying. Painted in 2020, Such a Perfect Day belongs to a group of works completed and exhibited following the first COVID-19 lockdown. While many reflected a sense of instability and uncertainty, the present work is full of hope and optimism, its subject gleaming like a beacon against a cloudless sky.
Born and based in Málaga, Calleja is currently the subject of his largest solo show to date at the city’s Centro Cultural Fundacion Unicaja. Over the years he has exhibited widely throughout Europe, America and Asia, cultivating a practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. His works invite comparison with the those of Yoshitomo Nara, whose insouciant, childlike figures were an important influence. Elsewhere, he has drawn inspiration from the works of artists including Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Mark Rothko and Rene Magritte: the present work, with its caricatured mop of hair, conjures fleeting echoes of the latter’s floating clouds. Calleja also reads widely, often incorporating fragments of literary text into his subjects’ t-shirts. Many draw upon the work of Samuel Beckett; others are derived from snippets of overheard conversation, or the artist’s own imagination.
Calleja has explained that ‘every character is a little bit of a self-portrait’: they are, in effect, his ‘children’. Deliberately simplified, and deeply anti-conceptual, they are emblems of carefree, youthful freedom, capturing an age that, for Calleja, was ‘the happiest time in my life’. Yet while his works share something of the ‘kawaii’ (‘cute’) aesthetic espoused by Nara, Takashi Murakami and others, their clean, flat features and repetitive forms ultimately become vehicles for exploring deeper emotional registers. ‘With these simple characters, only a pair of eyes and one T-shirt, I can talk about everything’, he explains. ‘I can be critical, empathic, happy’ (J. Calleja, quoted in S. Bogojev, ‘Javier Calleja: Finding That Magic Moment’, Juxtapoz). Humour, irony, rebellion, tenderness and pathos swim within their glistening eyes, drawing the viewer deeper into Calleja’s interior world.
Born and based in Málaga, Calleja is currently the subject of his largest solo show to date at the city’s Centro Cultural Fundacion Unicaja. Over the years he has exhibited widely throughout Europe, America and Asia, cultivating a practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. His works invite comparison with the those of Yoshitomo Nara, whose insouciant, childlike figures were an important influence. Elsewhere, he has drawn inspiration from the works of artists including Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Mark Rothko and Rene Magritte: the present work, with its caricatured mop of hair, conjures fleeting echoes of the latter’s floating clouds. Calleja also reads widely, often incorporating fragments of literary text into his subjects’ t-shirts. Many draw upon the work of Samuel Beckett; others are derived from snippets of overheard conversation, or the artist’s own imagination.
Calleja has explained that ‘every character is a little bit of a self-portrait’: they are, in effect, his ‘children’. Deliberately simplified, and deeply anti-conceptual, they are emblems of carefree, youthful freedom, capturing an age that, for Calleja, was ‘the happiest time in my life’. Yet while his works share something of the ‘kawaii’ (‘cute’) aesthetic espoused by Nara, Takashi Murakami and others, their clean, flat features and repetitive forms ultimately become vehicles for exploring deeper emotional registers. ‘With these simple characters, only a pair of eyes and one T-shirt, I can talk about everything’, he explains. ‘I can be critical, empathic, happy’ (J. Calleja, quoted in S. Bogojev, ‘Javier Calleja: Finding That Magic Moment’, Juxtapoz). Humour, irony, rebellion, tenderness and pathos swim within their glistening eyes, drawing the viewer deeper into Calleja’s interior world.