Mundo Sumo

Sumo is a wrestling discipline that is more than 1,500 years old. It is a cultural and anthropological time capsule since it has never been seen outside its geographical environment. The sumo wrestler is a human being whose physical evolution is exclusively oriented towards gaining volume and mass in order to expel his opponent from the fighting perimeter. The physical deformation that this transformation entails represents a standard of beauty and admiration for the Japanese. In the bull fighting, for example, there is a parallelism: its existence and evolution of the breed are only justified by the existence of bullfighting it self. Throught this collection I try to highlight the aesthetics that a sumo wrestler can represent, taking him out of his environment and placing him in places that border on surrealism but that somehow justify his presence, creating a neopop aesthetic by integrating manga characters in some cases, that break the anachrony of the character and even insert him into settings that are familiar to us. I make this fighting character almost a superhero with a cosmopolitan touch. In Mundo Sumo I place the wrestler in places that are totally hostile to him, due to his lack of knowledge of the environment, thus paying tribute to this ancient character, by bringing him closer to all audiences and all cultures with a very personal surreal touch.

Note: The faces of the sumo wrestlers in the art works are real characters from the professional sumo world in Japan.