Diving in the Madrid art scene, the multidisciplinary artist parades the raw tissue of beauty. Smartphones, mirrors, and masks, he tackles contemporary identities
A synopsis of discarded realism
A lucid trip, a plastic landscape lip-synching with alien beats – Filip Custic ping-pongs his art in a surrealistic, synesthetic manner. The twenty-nine years old Spanish-Croatian creative started as a photographer in the fashion industry, quickly turning towards innovative areas of expression by working among all media, from editorials, innovative technology, art performances, and exhibitions.
His works implode over conservative narratives; they curate futuristic techniques while immortalizing a gaze over present times. Charismatically and effortlessly, the body meets technology as two of civilization’s pillars. If humans can be crucially observed and defined by the sole change of utensils, there’s nothing more raw and honest in describing society than tech objects.
Rip out the coat of arms, defragment the objects surrounding us and puzzle them in psychedelic matches. The visual designs Filip Custic portrays become a poetically structured algorithm, suggesting a voyage in wonderland places. There’s something almost comforting in finding AirPods, zodiac symbols, and roman letters on the same canvas.
Filip Custic, Cuadros virtuales
In custic’s virtual paintings (Cuadros virtuales), entertaining methods navigate the history of civilization, speaking of the red thread that is human behavior. Emphasizing how technologies overtake consciousness, the young artist breaks out the fears of gamification and artificial realms.
Inoculating symbology. All the objects we can’t imagine
Foreign imaginaries become familiar when you look at them long enough. Inspired by hyperrealism, cacophonic art attempts, or pataphysics, the artist draws perspective from Dalì, Magritte, Michelangelo, and Duchamp. However, Filip Custic disrupts any previous attempts at visually densifying reality. Rather than mocking the limitations of our perceptions, he celebrates imagination and triggers curiosity.
«The objects inspiring me the most now are intelligent machines and new human inventions. Previously, I was more brutalist and harsher, I liked to come close to a church because of its symbology. But nowadays, our era’s new object or element is technology».
Filip Custic, Prisma humano
With mathematical precision, Filip crafts a contemporaneity lexicon where he integrates nature, machinery, or tools. He is constantly questioning the gaze of the future. How will upcoming generations decipher the present and its reshaping aesthetic language? In 2018, he participated at Rencontres D’ Arles with ‘prisma humano’, a project depicting the artist’s body embellished by multi-colored glass textures, collecting and directing light.
Custic introduced a static exhibitionism that transpires through images the sensations of a live performance. Using astral connotations and philosophical references, some of his works look like a guide to the centralization of the human body in nature. What comes out is how more than ever, humans are now able to contemplate and fully design a whole environment from intangible matters.
If recreación de la placa Pioneer and HOMO-? are more abstract, Custic’s later works distinctly present the attempt to embrace our specie’s relationship with technology. For example, ‘i’m your mirror’ is an Instagram filter allowing users to traverse identities and body images as if jumping through dimensions.
Talking bodies communicate imperfections
«We live in the age of dysmorphia, and I want to talk about all the importance we give to the body». With the latest pi(x)el project exposed at Espacio SOLO in Madrid, where the artist lives, he confesses to «looking for something more realistic».
Filip assembles an art performance where the unboxing process relies on hyper realistic bodies directed by technological elements. Drawing inspiration from the commercial culture, he hints at social media and the obsessive temptation of invading every moment. By translating the body into new forms and rehearsing the raw self through idealization, the artist proposes playing with identities.
Filip Custic and his main focus: ego
In an almost scenographic manner, Filip Custic uses self-portrayal alongside the representation of his muses, achieving a strong sense of community. At the same time, his central focus remains the ‘ego’, be it a singular ego or the ego of our current times. It is about constantly reeducating ourselves about beauty. While working in fashion, Filip recognized the standards and patterns absorbed from the surrounding imaginary.
«I think we’ve idealized concepts like beauty so much that we’ve made them unattainable and they only cause us suffering. To compensate for that, now I have to show more realistic beauty, without retouching, and also looking to reprogramme myself. All this information that I have been receiving during all these years I have been working has helped me to come to the creative conclusion that I need to create something like pi(x)el, which talks precisely about showing beauty as it is: earthly beauty, beauty without filters, non-virtual beauty (even if it is told through technology), but raw beauty».
Is humanity only about the right styling?
From Rosalia to Virgen Maria and Julia Stone, Filip Custic realized the album cover of artists who influence the zeitgeist and are searching for a niche that can powerfully and loudly express womanhood. Many fashion houses reached for the artist’s immersive virtual paintings. Gucci created two campaigns in 2017 and 2019 as well as the virtual performance titled ‘mascara hyperrealistic.
A suprematist suspension for Camper, Louboutin’s picturesque goddess, the visionary visuals for ALEPH and Carolina Herrera 212 – many brands relied on Filip’s efficiency to cultivate a visual impact. We live in a world gravitating around the dressed body and its fashions, where nakedness is effectively surrealist. Subverting the preconception of dress, Filip Custic doesn’t speak about nudity.
«I feel I never put fully naked bodies. I always compliment that nakedness with something and that’s how I would like to dress the body. The way it’s dressed does not cover the censored parts that society tells us to cover obligatorily, the reason why it feels naked».
Between humanity and artificial intelligence
Alongside objects and body-filled visual vocabulary, the artist styles his figures around urban surroundings or landscapes, like Venice or skylines seen from above. When he started, Filip used to create everything in a studio, on a white canvas, later adding some colors.
«At some point, I started to like and feel inspired by the real world. Our surroundings. Because I think that portraying our present time is very obvious in our time, but in the future, it will be seen as nostalgic and vintage».
Grasping the threshold between humanity and artificial intelligence, Custic’s work overlaps AI tendencies, dissecting the pieces leading to the human imprint on art. He perceives artificial intelligence technologies as a progress-leading tool, something to support the human creator. «I think that by itself the result is interesting, but it always needs human input».
He often questions the relationships between science and religion, development and ritual, and eventually between humans and technology. «I connected a lot with spirituality, but nowadays, I balance a lot of the spiritual information with the most scientific one, with my own beliefs and with my theories of the theories that I found out anywhere else».
Cultivating a safe space for technology in current imaginaries
There is an ongoing process of acknowledging the role of technology in current behaviors. It becomes a deciding factor, a foreign organism fully absorbed by our day-to-day mechanism. It is both a protagonist and an underdog, and its impact is often silent. The heroes of our time are virtual mediums, the reason why Filip’s performances and installations always contain a camera or smartphone.
While studying the past and its inventions, navigating many disconnected fields from philosophy, mathematics, and artistic movements such as the Renaissance or Bauhaus, futurism, brutalism, and contemporary art, the artist resumed his observations to one conclusion. Technology has become intrinsic to our generation.
Humans and cyborg structures
By diversifying the media through which he communicates, playing with sculpture, materializing ideas in videos, or toying with more virtual concepts such as filters, his gaze came closer to the future rather than the past.
«There was a moment when I felt I had no more past to look at. I was in the present and looking toward the future, seeing that the only differentiating element in our present was technology. I felt that technology is the only innovative element of our era and that it is an infinite medium conveying a surprise factor».
Filip is observing the evolution process, the uncanny creations are the framework of a dialogue between humans and cyborg structures. While witnessing the hybridization between artificial and natural fabrics of corporeality, plastic surgery, and prosthetics, the artist romanticizes their coexistence.
«I think we will suddenly look super bionic in the future, full of technology, and we will say, ‘When did all this happen?’ But it’s all very organic. I observe this evolution, I am part of it, and I portray it artistically because I seek to document my present or my near future. I like to bring virtuality to reality. I think that’s what my creative path is going to be. It’s also quite curious because we live in the age of virtuality, and that is when I want to materialize most».
Filip Custic
Filip Custic is a Spanish-Croatian multidisciplinary artist that lives and resides in madrid (spain). His work explores the impact of digital technologies on our conscience and sense of identity, bringing together art, technology and humankind.
