LIVING WITH: My Dead Pony: 1

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Over the course of his freelance career, Vicenzi has worked with big clients including Universal, Votre Beauté, Washington Post, Hemisphere, Virgin, and Madame Figaro. His work has been published in Taschen 100 Illustrators and Illustration Now – Portraits. He has also built up a large evergrowing fan base with 12,000 Facebook likes and 64,000 Behance followers. x8.3″; acid-free paper, images cut from magazines, Posca markers; 2023 YOU GET VOLCANOES I GET EMPTY PARKING LOTS I am all for personal interpretations because it is more enriching for the person who's looking at my works. In a way, I don't even know myself or what kind of meaning I really want to express until I realise that I was communicating something true without even knowing about it at first,” he said. It is Vicenzi’s creative bloom in relation to the advent of the internet as we know it today, as well as the development of Photoshop, that informs his creative eye. As a self-taught illustrator, he decided to switch gears into digital art some years ago to take advantage of the vast new array of tools that became available.

In your experience, what were the moments that you have struggled or had difficulty in coming up with a concept? How did you overcome/cope? Our readers would definitely love to know what hardware and software you use when you create your designs? I am listening to the internal dialogue while my body is busy cutting and re-arranging images until a new story emerges from my unconscious. These collage sets are his most recent works in year 2015, with elements of pop-inspired statements in crisp typography and casual scribbles. In this set, he used a pastel/bubblegum color palette for accents.Collage is an art form that is created from a variety of materials, colors, textures, etc. It became a thing in modern art when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque coined the term collage itself in the early 20th century. Over the years, collage has taken up different forms which include photomontage, digital collage, wood collage, mosaic, and eCollage.

A few people influenced my works like Jesse Draxler, THS, Eduardo Recife, David Carson, Raygun magazine are probably the ones that had a huge impact on me but I am forgetting so many others. RV: I think it's a weird mix of fashion illustration, street art, DYI, typography & collage works. It's just a melting pot of different influences that found their way into my way of thinking. I try to stay spontaneous when I work now, I used to over think what I did. Many years later I rekindled my love for collage and grungy experiments to explore a different path, trying to be more in line with my own kind of thinking and tastes in general. Raphaël Vicenzi, Ballon x8.3″; acid-free paper, images cut from magazines, Posca markers; 2023 I WANT TO FEEL LIKE TUNGUSKA AGAIN Looking a bit into the future, how do you think people will look at your designs in four years from now?

Designing has its ups and downs, what is the most difficult problem you ever faced as a designer?

When you began your journey as a designer you probably had a few role models, would you name two of your favorite artists? Sometimes I just want it to look organic in aesthetic terms. Other times I become totally obsessed with an idea and I struggle to transmit it in visual form. In my opinion, even if you try to avoid any meaning in your works, it always show somehow – even a stroke is representative of your state of mind or who you are at that moment in time. I would be lying if I said I was in total control of what I create.” A lot, I'll name a few, Tom Bagshaw, Banksy, Daniel Egneus, Stina Persson, David Foldvari, Muscha and on and on... Free time it’s all I have, it’s just that as a freelance I chose to spend this time working on illustrations or looking for inspiration. I work more when I have a client project but it’s difficult to separate my free time and work time as they seem to blend together all the time. I based the name on an old picture of me as a toddler, sitting on a pony at the Belgian seaside. The pony was probably long gone, hence the name.

Raphaël Vicenzi, also known as Mydeadpony, is a Belgian illustrator. He creates layered mix media artwork that combine influences from art, fashion, graffiti and graphic design. It’s not something I can intellectualise too much but there is always a tension between happy accidents, randomness, composition and intentional creation. The way I combine my personal interests and tastes like fashion editorials, awkward graffitis, broken images and busy layering. TWS –Also there’s a visible connection with punk aesthetic? How does popular culture informs you and your art? Sometimes it is really to escape a situation or problem, sometimes it’s necessary to gather up your strength to keep going.After a while I just did pure handmade collages, I needed to build confidence in my own abilities. The process of cutting things up, using my hands was something that I missed without knowing it. As an illustrator, the most difficult thing for me is to be inspired by something I can’t really relate to. Trying to express certain ideas without being able to make them more personal is really difficult sometimes. that’s just the way I work though. As you can see he is a really cool artist who clearly replays to a lot of his fan base. The quote that came with this piece of work was of course wolf mirror which is basically saying when you look into the mirror most girls always says that look ugly or something that wouldn't be true and that would be the wolf mirror. A good quote from the artist that I found was from the internet although itisn'tabout the piece of work im looking at I felt that it should be in my indepthanalysis; None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free ,this quote from the artist is very deep in away and not expected from a artist I fill, I fill the quote is very much him and really does speak about his work in away, Such as this piece "those who falsely believe they are free" this part I think makes a better understanding to the wolf mirror piece as in a way your self as free in the mirror to be who you want to, and this girl in her image is a wolf and maybe in away shedoesn'tbelieve that she is free in the real world so their for slaved. I would say that this work is portraiture and makes the work fill like its going somewhere, I think if it was landscape it would make the work fill as if its staying their and not moving but with this being portraiture creates a story about the girl in away and she is getting on with wolf in the mirror. Last year he published a book of his work called LIVING WITH: My Dead Pony . The book features 32 of his most stunning artworks and has perforation along the spine, making each one removable for framing. Through my collage works, I am just trying to make sense of my own internal chaos, mapping my own internal landscape, and processing thoughts and feelings into a visual form.

I don’t think you’d see my works as provocative at first but it’s there. Although in a poetic way sometimes. Everything is being written in real time and in the end, no one knows where it will lead but let’s enjoy the ride together. In the context of illustration, collage is popularly used as a technique in children’s picture books, magazines, and other print and digital media. Vicenzi emphasizes that working with or without a compass can yield a worthwhile creative payoff, but a true artist is laid bare in the most minute of details either way. We asked Vicenzi about this evolution and how his assemblage method invites open-ended interpretation instead of narrating meaning. Does this kind of restraint add or detract from the final result?

Looking a bit into the future, how do you think people will look at your designs in four years from now?

I am interested in creating meaning from discarded images, inspired by fashion magazines, urban decay, and forgotten places. Always hoping to find unseen connections between elements, teetering on total randomness and controlled impulses, rewriting possibilities through happy accidents and instinctual markings.