Spanish artist Javier Calleja's new exhibition, Sooner or Later, will run through the month of October, 2020 at the Bill Brady Miami gallery in the United States. This is Javier Calleja's first solo exhibition in the U.S., featuring works that continue his style of street art. Calleja fuses pop symbols, such as cartoons, animation, and video games to interact with the audience through popular and accessible elements. He brings brand-new large sculptures and canvas pieces, as well as a series of drawings to the exhibition. His works transcend traditional art media, breaking the boundaries between drawing and installation to add subtle twists to images in everyday life. The public first learned of Calleja mostly through the limited edition sculpture piece Missing The Blue Sky , a cute and vibrant figure with a pair of big eyes. The image illustrates how the character leads the brush in Calleja's creative process while every detail conveys the state of the artist's mind in the moment as it extends the theme of the work.

Javier Calleja was born in Malaga in southern Spain in 1971. Before becoming an artist, he was a gymnast training to compete in the Olympics. He began his art career after graduating from the University of Granada with an art degree in 2000. Calleja once JAVIER CALLEJA GREEN DAYS WITH RED WORDS worked at a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of Malaga. The way he combines text and images in his works is evident of the influence Yoshitomo Nara has on his works. Deeply influenced by Japanese animation from an early age, Calleja also incorporates big anime eyes into his works. His first solo exhibition was held in Spain in 2003. Afterwards, his works were exhibited all over the world in cities such as Paris, Waldkirchen, Germany, Hamburg, and New York. He began holding gallery exhibitions in Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Tokyo in 2017 and had his first solo exhibition in Greece in 2019, making him one of the world's most promising contemporary artists.

In Javier Calleja's works, the initial source of inspiration was a pair of eyes in the dark, warily peering at its surroundings through a slit in the paper. Later, these characters with the big eyes gradually emerged out of the dark, showing their unique selves. The big eyes, a hallmark of Japanese animation characters, are reinterpreted by this Spanish artist. Javier Calleja integrates the everyday appeal of pop art with the flat format of manga. In his works, he manages to strike the appropriate balance between the cartoon, reality, and abstraction, making his works so much more than a flat cartoon.

In 1996, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami coined the term "Superflat": The world of the future might be like Japan is today - superflat (The idea was rounded out in 2001). A mix of cartoonish styles and cute images are used to present a virtual, absurd, free, and unassuming world, with utopian and dystopian themes included in parallel. In his Kawaii thesis in 2003, Murakami emphasized the importance of cuteness in modern society. In the work, Kawaii, he was, to a degree, conducting a response to this thesis. The wideeyed boy in the painting is a self-portrait by Javier Calleja of his own image in his mind. In front of the grassy green background, the boy's hair is fluffy like the clouds, and the pinkish color on the cheeks brings out the innocence and cuteness of the character. The eyes shine like a gem, with a color gradient that moves from bright to dark. The bright red nose stands out from the rest of the drawing, accentuating the innocent smile, while the sky-blue shirt is decorated with words that speak his mood. The bold use of colors and simple character lines combine to create this piece and its unique style. The painting, with its immense size, avoids being monotonous despite showing only a lone character. The painting is salient with joy, even without the overuse of colors.

Javier Calleja's works are like a diary that highlights the otherwise unnoticed moments and emotions of everyday life with witty words, reflecting his life. He deconstructs his past works, using only the heads of his iconic boys with big eyes, to create this new 3D piece. This trend of cuteness is becoming a whole new aesthetic concept - Cutism. It's healing to look at these works, as it once was for the artist to play with pebbles on his hometown beach. The idyllic life and the effortless simple words brings a light-hearted surprise to the inner minds of the audience.