CACTUS PROJECT is an ongoing artistic project, a space to experiment with „thorny” ideas in various techniques, materials, and utensils, often unconventional.
This project started as a fun exercise to help me define my own style, but it soon escalated into a personal challenge to see how far I could take this character, the cactus, who has become my personal mascot. This character has gone through countless techniques and mediums, from classical drawing, to clay sculpture, vector illustration, animation to digital sculpture… and the journey is just beginning. This project is an ongoing one, and I will update the status of the „journey” along the way, so fasten your seatbelts because it will be a long and diverse journey.
In an increasingly sensitive world, where people are turning into fragile pansies, with frail stems and petals trembling at the first draft of air, I choose to be a cactus. A cactus with personality, with jokes to match and enough thorns to keep stupidity at bay, but also with colorful flowers for those who have the patience to get closer.
I choose to laugh at the absurd situations around me, because otherwise I would dry up faster than a cactus forgotten on the balcony in winter. Humor is my fertile soil, optimism is the rare water I collect in myself, and colors are the flowers that appear exactly when you least expect it.
I am inspired by everything I see: people, contexts, everyday absurdities, lines that would deserve to be printed on banners. Everything passes through my filter, and in the end a cactus comes out. No two are the same: some are grumpy, others cheerful, some philosophers, others party animals. Some stare blankly, others stare at you as if they can read your mind. Some may look exactly like the neighbor who is angry that you parked in their spot. But each one has a story and, in the end, they are all part of the same big family – the cactus tribe.
Why cacti and not something else? Because a cactus doesn’t lie to you: it’s direct, it’s honest and it knows how to survive where others falter. That’s how my art is – a mix of humor, irony and bright colors, which wants to sting you a little, but also to make you smile.
Romanian visual artist with roots in street art and pop art. Through my works, I juggle with hilarious and perhaps sarcastic themes, alternative techniques, sometimes even experimental and messages meant to try to make you smile on the outside, but also give you food for thoughton the inside.
I experiment with all kinds of techniques and materials, and I am always in a continuous search and play… My main areas of activity are mural painting, illustration (analog & digital), mixed-media techniques, but I also flirt with
3D modeling and animation.
In 2017 I started this journey with a series of very clumsy sketches with humanized cactae. I felt somewhat attached to this character, but at the time I didn’t think I was going to take the concept any further.
During the pandemic, I was lucky enough to stay in isolation with my friends and fellow artists from the V-Light Crew. Together we thought of a series of illustrations to be implemented on products (prints, mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, masks). This is how this spiny, el Pedro, appeared, inspired by one of the first sketches made some years ago.
Also during the pandemic, together with V-Light we started the „Character Moday” project, which we stuck to for 11 editions. Each week a theme was chosen, and each artist conceived a character based on the proposed idea. This is how Green Lan-Pedro appeared, a combination of him Pedro and Green Lantern, in the first edition of Character Monday with the COMIC theme.
I also designed a (very) short comic strip featuring these prickles. The idea, although quite trivial, I it liked a lot, and I would like you to continue it in the future, with something more consistent and more elaborate, both from the point of view of the work technique and the story.
From the year 2022 I wanted to go more out of the comfort zone and thus I started flirting with digital 3D modelling. So I learned the basics of Nomad Sculpt software and experimented with different simple shapes until I got the courage and felt the need to design something more complex. And so we arrived at the 3D cactus series.
I also learned a little about video editing, and fell in love with stop-motion in particular. Precisely because of this, the animations made with these cactuses are not fluid but rather laggy. Each cactus position is hand-rendered in Nomad Sculpt and then added in Procreate, keeping a close eye on that stop-motion effect.
AND THIS IS HOW THE REAL JOURNEY BEGINS ….
