Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
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Having grown-up with the revolution of the Sega Master gaming system, Thomas Mazzarella depicts the metropolis as an ambivalent metaphor where modern and post-modern architecture is both the place of all fantasies—funny, bizarre and intriguing like a video-game—as well as a highly artificial space where the ability to dream is the way to escape. A sense of nostalgia permeates his paintings as if we all were the amnesic primitives of a new era, forced to accept the conditions of contemporary existence. Here, the viewer occupies an ambiguous position. A voyeur behind a screen, isolated from reality, unable to reach it, but still willing to grasp the meaning of it, to be part of it.
All paintings: Untitled, 2019, 20x20cm, oil on canvas
About the Artist
I grew up in Belgium, and I live and work in Brussels. At the beginning, I first started with graffiti, and at the time I was studying computer science. I was studying near a contemporary art museum. In my last years at school, I began to paint a little. At home, in the privacy of my bedroom. I painted tortured faces on plywood boards that I bought with my mother. At the same time, I started graffiti. Timidly. I went out under a bridge near the house at night, with a ladder. I was a self-taught painter. At that time, I had never taken courses in painting or drawing.
It was through the internet that I became interested in it. Then I met graffiti artists elsewhere in Belgium. I made contacts. I began to travel. Then I began study painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Liège.
Painting was the only thing that interested me. Upon entering the Academy, I did graffiti. First in Liège, then in other cities, in Belgium and in France. Never very far. But we moved around. Every weekend, we tried to go somewhere to jam in abandoned places. Illegal things sometimes, but not much. And then, with the help of my professors, I discovered artists who influenced me and led to what I do now.
