Felipe Cardeña

Felipe Cardeña is a very well known artist that nobody has ever seen. The newspaper "Corriere della Sera" wrote on May 2008: "We only thing we know is that he was born in Balaguer, Spain, 29 years ago. The rest of the information we have regarding Felipe Cardeña, mysterious artist Banksy's style, is fragmentary and contradictory. His floreal collages – whose technique was probably developed in jail – and his floreal stickers appear everywhere: his slogan is Power Flower"(1). Maybe behind Felipe Cardeña's identity there is a collective of artists with different backgrounds and origins, probably related to the street art world. Certanly one of the first exhibitions where he appeared was in the 2005 in Milan, Miracolo a Milano (2), by acting as the statue of St John the Headless, and where he stood without a single movement for six hours. In 2007, he put the pirates flag right at the entrance of the exhibit Sweet Art Street Art as the symbol of street artists who fought and won over the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, in Milan. Eventually, his art work was stolen by one of the visitors. Since the end of 2007 he started the project "Power Flower". In 2008 Felipe Cardena prepared a gigantic panel to be shown at the street art exhibit Scala Mercalli, dedicated to the Dalai Lama. "Free Tibet Free Flowers" was written on the panel in capital letters. in 2009 he exposed a giant panel with the portrait of Che Guevara "floreciente" in L'Avana, Cuba, for the Arte Mas 2009, Festival Internacional de arte y Literatura joven. His most recent art work is based on the idea of “surprise” and “astonishment”: large – sometimes monumental – colorful flower compositions, eccentric collages, unusual shapes, strongly exaggerated images underlining the themes of religion and cultural diversity, a mixture of human and natural forms. Vittorio Sgarbi wrote that "Felipe Cardeña proposes the amateur technique of collage pursuing a repetitive and obsessive iconography as the daily rosary of a cloistered nun". (3)