MiraRudio (Joseba Elorza) is a brilliant illustrator and animator. Joseba studied to become a sound technician and later went to art school. It was from this "synesthetic hodgepodge where MiraRuido sprang from; I used to spend the morning as a sound technician in a radio station and the evening working on collages. Sight gradually took over hearing." Joseba's list of clients include the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, National Geographic, Amazon Studios and Green Day amongst others. We spoke about his influences and creative approach.
Surreal alternative dreams.
I would say that my work is influenced by an artistic current that is nourished by what Magritte and other artists like him did. But beyond specific names, and although it sounds like an outdated cliché, the inspiration comes from everyday life and cultural works that we all consume on a daily basis. Surrealism tries to give a twist to what we all take as mundane, and for that, you have to look at what we have in front of us every day with a slightly different look.
I've always had two different ways of working in my career. One starts with a specific idea that arises from that gaze at reality, which I sketch on paper and then look for the necessary material to collage. The other is when I simply start browsing through the immense archive of photos and videos that I've been collecting over the years, and from there, new concepts or ideas usually emerge that I end up iterating infinitely.
We would have to define what technology is first, but in my case, computers and all the facilities that it has provided have been an opportunity that perhaps, if they didn't exist, I would have dedicated myself to something completely different. We are all children of our time, and I was born with Copy and Paste and Ctrl + Z, and they have shaped my art and, I would say, even my way of thinking.
Maybe the series I'm working on now, "Roomscapes". In it, I manipulate rooms to turn them into natural interior spaces that represent a juxtaposition between the wild and the safe, the extraordinary and the everyday. How to feel safe within 4 walls and, at the same time, explore natural territories that connect with our wildest selves.
