Klik hier voor Nederlands
Boyan Montero (1992) embraces complexity and contradiction as inherent qualities of human existence. With a Bulgarian mother, a Mexican father, and partly raised in China, you might even say that Montero embodies this complexity. This theme is an important point of departure for their work. In Montero’s drawings, the various aspects of their identity are all tied together, for which cartoons and fairytales serve as important sources of inspiration. After all, stories in which anything is possible can serve as a framework for experimentation, according to the artist.
Montero appeals to their inner child to gain access to a more intuitive and instinctive way of creating. This working method not only results in layered and enigmatic drawings, collages, and photographs, but also in music, poems, and performances. In each medium, Montero strives for some kind of abundance, a mixture of emotions and experiences in which cheerfulness and darkness, as well as realism and fiction, are all allowed to exist alongside each other. This is apparent in the work Waterfall (2025), an almost literal cascade of drawings in which everything appears to have free rein. Waterfall also serves as the backdrop for the performance Crying Rubber Ducks (2025), a poem Montero put to music in collaboration with Boris Bezemer as part of an opera.
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)