Their presence is implied. They’ve built gravity-defying structures from shopping carts, stacked newspapers, and plywood. They’ve hung laundry and left crushed beer cans scattered across surfaces, and yet the real subjects of Alvaro Naddeo’s paintings are never seen. In the unsteady piling of trash (rendered in meticulous detail) there is an implication of adaptability, of forward momentum. Some of these structures are mobile, piled high on tiny scooters or food carts, others have multiple rooms and repurposed electronics. While alien in aggregate, Naddeo—who has worked in advertising for decades—grounds his work in the instantly recognizable: a Coca-Cola sign, an In-N-Out Burger bag, a box of Frosted Flakes. This is a world that was once familiar—a hyper realistic portrayal of a dystopian existence. If we pay attention, it’s a warning.
Naddeo works in a multi-step process that starts in the abstract and ends on the page. “I am self-taught, so I have been developing a process for the last ten years or so,” he explains. The system is fluid, subject to additions and subtractions. At the moment, Naddeo is experimenting with an airbrush, something that may or may not be a permanent addition. He always begins with an idea. Unlike some artists who rely on a sketchbook, Naddeo keeps his thoughts on post-it notes and random papers. Once an idea is born, he transitions to the computer, where he begins to formulate the composition using 3-D software. “The 3-D part isn’t the hardest, but it’s the part that takes the longest,” he explains. “It’s also important to note that this part is just for perspective and proportions. It doesn’t involve color, texture, or light. It’s just gray boxes.”
From the software, Naddeo transitions to Photoshop, sometimes bringing in photographic references for elements like brand logos or lettering. After he is satisfied with the skeleton of the composition, he moves to the page, where he applies color, texture, light, and shadow. “I don’t study or plan out the colors very much,” he says. “I know some artists do study versions, I don’t. I just start painting and feeling and finding the right colors.” His medium of choice is watercolor paints, a material he had not expected to fall in love with. When he first began painting, Naddeo was still living in New York City and looking for a creative outlet. His apartment was tiny, and he needed a means of artistic expression that was simple and required minimal clean-up. “My whole artistic studio would fit in a drawer,” he says of his early foray into watercolor. “It was just a letter-sized block of paper, a small paint set and three brushes.”
While watercolor was a choice of convenience at the time, it eventually became his go-to material. “There is a tendency of a lot of watercolor artists to paint very ethereal and dreamy scenes; the techniques and themes can sometimes be similar or repetitive,” he explains. Eventually, however, he found that watercolor was tactile and pliable, able to express texture and depth better than some other mediums he had previously been drawn to. “With watercolor, depending on how much water you use and how you apply the colors, it can be very organic and have a life of its own. It creates a texture very similar to what happens in nature. I start with allowing it to be unpredictable, but then I go back and correct it and make it look how I want to.”
sometimes it’s more the irony of advertising, of how you can say one thing but what actually happens is the opposite.”