Dissecting Nychos
Nychos grew up in Austria in a hunting family, where as a young man would watch his father dismember animals. But he wasn’t disgusted, rather intrigued, and the kind of anti-beauty of the process stuck with him to later influence his creative output. Starting with cartoon illustrations, Nychos took his art to the street where he began large-scale graffiti works of cross-sections and dissections of human and animal bodies, and even popular characters from SpongeBob SquarePants to Mickey Mouse and The Little Mermaid.
His pieces are not hard to miss, not only for their aesthetic, but scale and technique, leading him to many solo shows worldwide. From the streets to the gallery, Nychos’s successful Rabbit Eye Movement started as a street art concept and is now a fully-fledged gallery, art agency and home to a network of artists.
Visiting Australia, Nychos popped into fluoro’s Melbourne HQ where he spoke about dissection, the transition to art, the Rabbit Eye Movement and how an accident when he was two years old changed his life forever.
fluoro. Welcome back to Australia. How long has it been since you were here last?
Nychos. I haven’t been here in ten years. Exactly ten years ago I was in Melbourne for the first time. I painted on the streets here just for fun, met a couple of good local artists that are still good friends of mine and now I’m back.
f. Good to have you back. There are many people in Australia who admire your work and are looking forward to seeing what you create and show here. We know about your interest in the internal working of animals, what was it like for you, growing up and seeing all that?
N. Since I grew up with it, it was just kind of normal. It’s weird. In the first place you’re like, I was a little kid, and in the first situation you’re shocked. But because I was so young, I was like ‘oh this is how a body looks like inside’, ‘oh this is how it smells’, ‘this is how an intestine of a deer looks’ and you just see all this blood coming out but then … it’s just disgusting. It’s not something you see everyday luckily, I guess. My dad just taught me everything when I was about four years old. Then as a kid you learn how to skin an animal and take off the parts, you eat off the bone and that’s an intense world, most people forget that part of it, when they buy a steak.
f. How did you turn something that may be seen as cruel into something so beautiful?
N. First of all it has to do with the mixture of anatomies and the cruelness, with my style and the cartoon approach in the first place which got less in the last few years, but that’s all planned. I want to make my work to be less cartoony and be more accurate with skeletons, and also try to make it a bit more real, but still stick to my aesthetic.
f. Recently you’ve started painting humans, and mystical characters like the mermaids. Why did you decide to go into those characters? Was it humour?
N. Of course – the humor is very important. My first idea was, since I also came more from this cartoon character, design, background from graffiti…I was just sitting at home and painting characters and finding my own style. At some point I was watching cartoons and also got more into this anatomy thing again and it just came back later and I always liked drawing skeletons anyway. But I was like, when you see for example, Spongebob with the sponge and his thin legs, it would not work in general. I was like ‘the skinny legs can’t carry a sponge’…but it doesn’t matter you see that a lot with cartoons and characters that just would never work, and then I was like hmmm I could actually come up with their anatomy because I can and I know.
So that’s just the mixture, I just did that and came up with it and did research. One of my favourite things was the Ninja Turtles which, if you know the anatomy of a turtle, the vertebrae for example goes right into the shell and comes back out, so there is enough space that the whole body can disappear in the shell. But a Ninja Turtle also has human proportions, so you mix the aesthetics of a turtle and the human. The verterbrae is in the shell but it has a human pelvis, and everything is pretty much like a human. So I look at the turtle skeleton and the human skeleton and just combine them. But this is my background and the time I have. I’m also working on my next book right now that is only about my research, my drawings and how much I focus on how the body really works.
f. How do you think you’ve evolved as an artist and how has your work evolved?
N. I just go with the flow. You just get better and better and you can put more detail in and you also don’t want to do the same thing all the time. I feel like it’s more of an evolution from a cartoon artist to a fine artist, and work on whatever I want to do. It’s just endless, the whole anatomy thing, it’s just an endless thing and lately I’ve been – first I was just dissecting everything – and since two or three years I’ve been working very much on X-Rays and translucencies. So that’s more like coming out of a spray technique which I started doing lately, like transparently over organs, so you can see what’s inside the stomach for example. And then I came up and said ‘well I can make a whole body translucent’. First it had that X-Ray look with just a crazy blue for example, and then lately I’ve been working on showing the anatomy without exploding the body at all, but still having the normal outside skin. So my head is like ok what do I need to do and my head just goes through the steps – ‘ok I need to have less contrast on the base colours so that I can fade the skin colour on top of all the anatomy but still have enough contrast that you can see everything inside’.
f. Does that process, or do those stages change if you’re creating art outside on a wall, versus art in a studio?
N. No that’s mainly only a matter of the image, I’m not spray painting on the canvas. But for the translucency I have my own little technique where I mix paint and make it really fluid and shoot it through the airbrush. For me, the whole look of my murals is just so much my aesthetic so, that little graininess from the streets, from the graffiti, a little bit of dirt and spray over, I also like to keep that on my paintings.
f. Is that hard to retain that element?
N. Sometimes it just gets too much and you need a little bit of distance just to fix things and sometimes it leads you somewhere, and then a couple of months later you’re like ‘what the fuck have you been doing?’ but it’s part of evolving and learning, so it’s fine.
f. What other things interest you and impact your work?
N. Well I think that meditation is within the research – the nerd stuff – that’s how I meditate. It’s my alone time and I just kind of dig into those things and wonder what’s coming next and look at a lot of stuff on the internet. I go on Pinterest for example, and I type in ‘this and this’ skeleton and things just pop up, and I see that I can use this and this and this. I spend four or five hours doing research, and I have folders full of crap and that I will probably never use, but it’s just good to look at things and I do that a lot. Apart from that, music.
Well I listen to a lot of heavy metal, doom, any kind of rock and roll, stoner rock and psychedelic rock. It really depends on what I’m doing. If I’m painting a mural, it’s definitely more metal, and when I’m in the studio, it’s definitely more psychedelic stuff.
f. What way does it affect your work?
N. Definitely. In every way. Emotion – anger [laughs]…everything. It just comes out, and if the music is really fast I start painting really fast, and from painting really fast it kind of gets its own style and it’s own look and I like those pieces way more because it has a completely different emotion, compared to a simple drawing where I had too much time to think.
f. We want to know about your encounter with the White Rabbit.
N. Oh shit.
f. You’ve spoken about it being a really interesting moment. What was it like for it to have changed your life?
N. Where do I start? That’s a long answer [laughs]. First of all I think it also started when I was about seven I watched this cartoon, Watership Down for the first time and I think when you are young and you’re watching anything, it influences you. And with this cartoon the same thing happened to me as with looking at my dad dissecting animals. It started like a very normal Disney cartoon and then it went just nuts, super brutal and rabbits killing each other…and there was this rabbit of death, which appeared as a white rabbit but then he changed into a black rabbit. But I could not remember that, it was just the last thing I remembered from the cartoon back then, was this white rabbit. The other rabbit was about to die and just followed him, and then the rabbit thing just followed me, even as a little kid already. I didn’t know what it meant. I mean following the White Rabbit doesn’t mean much more than taking LSD, but it comes in so many things like Monty Python, The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland.
Later when I had already done the Rabbit Eye Movement for a couple of years, I watched Donnie Darko and that story is pretty close to what happened to me later. When I was 19 I had this really weird encounter with a traffic mirror, for example, and I kind of tripped out and I had five car accidents in the same context which was weird and then one night in between those car accidents I had a really crazy dream about a half rotten dead rabbit and I woke up and knew what I had to do. I kind of see it like…I was in school and I was so bad in school at this point, I didn’t have any output, only input, just visual input all the time and I didn’t draw much. That was the time when I started to take graffiti very seriously and the steadier output was so important for my existence. That just really changed me, and under hypnosis, they found out that I had an encounter as a two-year-old with one of those traffic mirrors, and something white popped up in the mirror and it ended up being a white car that almost hit me. It was like some memory which was buried. And this is why I’m so interested in dreams and memories.
Your brain keeps everything somewhere and then creates your personality, and whatever you’re inspired by. I think that most of it is digested. In the rapid eye movement that’s where I think ideas are born. This is my theory and this is also why I am interested in Sigmund Freud and my friend Christian, he’s the guy who did The Deepest Depths Of The Burrow, he’s been reading a lot of his stuff and keeps telling me ‘that it’s pretty crazy for me to see this way…’.
That was when I was 19 and then I started to paint rabbits back then, and with that it just made sense to call it the Rabbit Eye Movement. And since then I just build everything on that.
f. What’s the mission of the Rabbit Eye Movement?
N. It’s about taking all over the world [laughs]. I just transfer it to the urban art world because that’s where I come from, that’s what interests me and as a graffiti artist you feel like all the world is your enemy and later I watched Watership Down again, and the rabbits have some kind of weird religion where they realise that the whole world is their enemy where all the animals can go and kill rabbits. So the rabbit has to be smart and fast and live underground. So it’s just like a metaphor for people doing art in the public space. You have to prepare, come out, do your thing and disappear. It’s kind of like this Ninja thing and I didn’t want to say ‘this is only street art, this is graffiti, this is tagging, this is paste-ups’. Everyone has their own little mission in the little system he lives in. The development and the motivations of the artists are so different. With travelling and painting so much I’ve met so many people who have different motivations, different ideas and different mentalities and they always show me their way, like how they do their thing in their cities, in their places where they live because they say they can’t do this because they’re going to get you! So you always feel like you’re in different world, but you meet this one person and let this one person be the White Rabbit you can follow it so as not get busted, for example.
f. Tell us about Monochrome Organism your new body of work which will be on show at Juddy Roller.
N. It has a little bit of a study idea and a study background. Since I’ve been working on my book, I’ve been drawing a lot, and I just collected and got those drawings together. It’s all about organs and bones and the tools you would slice a body with, a chainsaw. It’s going to be drawings and only black and white, so it’s completely away from colour. but the paintings and the very colourful pieces is what you know mostly, but I’ve been drawing so much and inking so much people don’t really see that kind of stuff. It’s definitely most of the artworks that end up in the book and it’s also what I was thinking of lately is trying to get a bit more of this surgery background and more study. It’s more innate, it’s not like oh yeah I’m going to go to a show and see a couple of drawings of dissected animals, it’s not necessarily that, it’s different.
f. You’re unveiling the Sigmund Freud sculpture at Federation Square. Tell us a little bit about that.
N. We built the whole thing in San Francisco and that was already very interesting to see how it came together. First, we made a three-dimensional design and so we were looking for a place, that just made sense, because we knew we had to be there – I had to be there – and then we also had to ship it to New York, which was quite insane. We didn’t want to make it in Europe, of course. The first idea was to create something that represents Austria, Vienna, and but also is very known in the US and worldwide.
I had the idea of Sigmund Freud mainly because I’m very interested in dreams in general, and where an idea for a creative, for and artwork, where is it born. I have the theory that it just comes from our dreams and Sigmund Freud was like a very important Austrian, I would say. I dissected him and took his brain out, and his skeleton, his brain comes out, and can just like chill out on the couch there, take some selfies if you feel like.
That was really cool. It has a crazy steel skeleton and we cut out the foam, sanded the whole thing and coated it with fiberglass.
It was a two-month process of creation and we went from New York to Europe and to Australia. It’s made its journey.
f. When is the new book you’ve spoken about being released?
N. Well that’s the question! It depends how much work we’re going to put into it and of course I have to be happy with it – it’s probably something like a painting, you’re probably never going to be happy with it. But the idea is to have it finished by November, December this year. Time is just going really fast, we’re just so busy with working on the Rabbit Eye Movement and all projects at the same time. Sometimes we feel like we don’t really get to the work we really want to do in the longterm just because we feel like we have so much to do. The idea of the book…we were talking about it since 2015. We said that after the show, The Transluecent Theory we thought ‘now we’re going to get home and work on that book’ and to be honest we have not even started it yet. It’s very structured and confused.
f. What’s next?
N. I’m going to go back to San Francisco, stay there for a while, paint in the Bay Area a little bit, and then in May I’m going to head back to Europe, paint a mural in Berlin and Hamburg and I’ll have touch base with the team from Rabbit Eye Movement and see what’s going on – the boss has to be home sometimes. Then I’m going to go to Cancun to paint a mural there. The plan is to paint a big whale shark on a pretty big building, a translucent one. And then back to San Francisco and I’m going to have a show in November at Mirrors Gallery so I will have to sit down in the studio sometime too. Also we’re trying to push Rabbit Eye Movement as a brand so that’s lost of illustration work that needs to be done and a couple of other murals and Vancouver and Jordan. There are some other artists coming together for a festival in Jordan and those festivals are always fun. It’s like you’re meeting your friends somewhere and doing what you love.
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The inherent psychology behind Nachos’s unique work allows for an equally unique creative output. While Sigmund Freud argued that in our dreams our subconscious thoughts are surfaced, it can also be argued that in the studio the collision of the conscious and subconscious occurs creating some pretty wild art.
Nychos is now in Australia where he’s painting murals and is set lead workshops in Melbourne and Sydney, where participants can peer into Nychos’s coloring concepts and spray techniques. His Dissection of Sigmund Freud the three-meter tall sculpture of the seminal psychologist will be on display for the first time in Australia, making its way via San Francisco, New York and Europe. Together with the Vienna Tourist Board, the installation dissects Freud, revealing his inner psyche – literally. As part of the installation you can get your mind mapped revealing the top destination for you to visit in Vienna.
Monochrome Organism opens tonight at 6pm (AEST) at Juddy Roller in Melbourne. The exhibition is on until Friday 24 March 2017.
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