Dan Matutina is a force to be reckoned with. He’s become known, not just in the Philippines, but around the world, for his designs and illustrations using simple lines, shapes and textures. He’s the founder of Plus63.net, a design blog focused on Filipino designs, and also Plus63.com, a showcase of the sights and sounds of the Philippines. He’s the creative head and co-founder of Idea!s, a social enterprise design & communications agency that helps bring great design to nonprofits and NGOs. If that’s not enough, he’s also a lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.
He’s worked with Popular Mechanics, Wired (Italy), CondeNast, The Few Gallery, AllDayBuffet, BBDO, DDB, Rogue Magazine, McDonald’s, the Coca-Cola Foundation, SEAir, FormFiftyFive and more. We’re lucky to have gotten the chance to interview him today, and even luckier to have him on our advisory board.
Our own Daiox Del Fierro asked him some questions (after the jump).
Right: The Man–Child. Popular cartoons flock the headspace of this eight-year-old boy, yet a beard amasses on his chin. This work displays the contradiction of a child mentally growing in an accelerated mental state that sprung from his exposure to adult activities and innuendos found in paraphernalia he is exposed to.
Dex Fernandez, a fine arts and advertising graduate from the Technology University of the Philippines, quit his job at an advertising firm to become a full-time artist. And the art world is better off for it. His art transports the viewer to another land—a tea-stained technicolor mash-up of the darling and the sinister—where both children and adults play with imaginary creatures, and otherworldly beings haunt us with the ugly truth about what’s right and wrong in the world.
Dex has an art show titled – + * running currently until February 24th, at Pablo Gallery at The Fort in Taguig, and was kind enough to answer some questions from me.
