The Artist Behind Art Is Trash
I was born in 1970 in Zafra, a small town in southern Spain, where my story begins not in the spotlight, but in the shadows of everyday labor and creative yearning. I started to draw and paint seriously around 1990, during a time when art was more of a survival instinct than a vocation. Alongside my creative beginnings, I worked countless odd jobs—manual, underpaid, and often soul-crushing. These early years were shaped by the constant balancing act between earning a living and nurturing my artistic drive.
In 1993, I enrolled in the School of Applied Arts in Mérida (Badajoz), hoping to give structure to my creative impulses. But after just a year and a half, I found the academic environment suffocating and uninspiring. I walked away from formal education and returned to Zafra, where I co-founded Rotuletto, a small business focused on signage, posters, and decorative painting. It was a step toward living off my art, but it still wasn't the liberation I was seeking.
In 2002, I made a drastic decision. I left everything behind—my hometown, the company, the comfort zone—and moved to London with the dream of devoting myself entirely to art. But the reality of life in the UK was harsh. I couldn't adapt to the cultural or social environment, and my art found no fertile ground. Disillusioned but not broken, I headed back to Spain.
At the end of 2003, I arrived in Barcelona for the first time. I immediately felt something stirring within me—this city was chaotic, vibrant, unpredictable. I decided to stay. Yet, life was far from easy. I scraped by with a series of precarious jobs, barely surviving. The years passed, filled with frustration and a growing sense of artistic suffocation.
Then, in mid-2009, something exploded inside me. It was a perfect storm: the aftermath of the financial collapse in Spain, widespread labor exploitation, the criminalization of street expression, rejection from traditional galleries, and above all, my own mounting creative desperation. That pressure erupted into a single, radical act: I went out into the streets of Barcelona and began painting on garbage.
That was the birth of "El Arte es Basura – Art Is Trash"—a pseudonym, a manifesto, and a defiant costume all at once. It was not just a name, but a symbolic rejection of the sanitized, elitist art world. "Art Is Trash" became my weapon of choice, a persona through which I could reclaim public space, subvert aesthetic norms, and pour my rage, humor, and truth onto discarded objects.
My process is raw, immediate, and emotional. I paint with no sketches, no plan, no academic polish—only instinct. Every creation is spontaneous and visceral, born out of my emotional state in that exact moment. A bottle cap, a torn mattress, a broken chair—anything can become a canvas for my thoughts. I speak through what others throw away.
“I come from working in the trash heap of the labor system, and in art, no one ever handed me anything. Living from my art today is my reward.”
“I paint instinctively—spontaneous and visceral—fully aware of both the praise and backlash that come with it.”
“Painting and sculpture are the mother of all the arts. They are tools of revolutionary struggle. I declare myself a furious warrior who dares to dream of a better world.”
Today, my work is known not only in the streets of Barcelona but across the world. Yet, I remain grounded in the chaos and honesty from which Art Is Trash was born. This is not just my art—it is my revolt, my freedom, and my truth.
