Between the Lines, 2016

Javier Calleja is an emergent artist from Malaga, a port city in Southern Spain. Based on contrasts and disjunctives, his artistic practice explores grandeur and smallness, obviousness and crypticism, childishness and adulthood, tenderness and sarcasm. Playing with spaces, scales and materials, the artist departs from a deep-rooted comic influence to create his own peculiar and make-believe world of characters with gigantic and almost disembodied eyes. Javier does not like to talk about the underlying meaning of his work, claiming that ‘good magicians never explain their tricks’. He wants to preserve the short-lived magic that takes place when we first look at his pieces, postposing the subsequent rationalization carried out by our brain. Javier is represented by the leading edge, Japan-based gallery Nanzuka.

Between the Lines features a mysterious figure hiding behind the lines of an empty notebook. Calleja wittily gives us access to the fourth dimension, to that world of raw ideas and creativity waiting to be unveiled by the ink of the artist’s pen. Javier is considered one of today's hottest artists. His last work to hit the auction block fetched a whopping half a million USD, resulting in ten times its initial estimate.