Searching for new trends by Víctor Quintas

One of my favourite contemporary works of art is Searching for new trends. This illustration was made by the Russian designer Anton Marrast, who actually lives in Barcelona. He’s well known for his surrealistic drawings and his manipulations of photographs. Searching for new trends was published for the first time in Designcollector digital magazine.

I don’t know exactly whether the image was painted using traditional techniques or done with digital tools—or maybe mixing both together. However, you can acquire a print version of it in the author’s website. The picture is a portrait of a woman who is licking a cassette tape while she rewinds it with a pencil. But that’s only the literal interpretation. There’s another metaphorical and deeper reading. The artist said about this: ‘On my artwork the girl licks a tape, and that is not an obvious state of nonsense. She reads or listens to the tape directly through the tongue.’ In my opinion, this is her solution to find new ways of keeping up-to-date, so she’s connecting with new trends as well as creating a trend itself (licking cassettes). I think this should be the aim of the 21 century artists—not licking tapes, but being influenced and innovating at the same time.

I really like this illustration because it’s very well painted. I love the details on the woman’s fingers. But not only that, I also like it because, although it’s unusual and surrealistic, Searching for new trends conveys a right vision of art.