Biography
¨Do things just because, without thinking their logic, and once they get done find their sense while people interact with them in the real world. This is the magic of Art and Design¨.
Rafael Angulo is a Spanish contemporary designer, artist and an inventor engineer born in the island of Gran Canaria in year 1974. Today he lives and works globally from this small island which, being located as a crossroads between Europe, Africa and America, is the place that he always took as reference for his comings and goings by the grosso world in which he lives, and not just the physical one, but also the one of his ideas.
Since he was quite young, design and drawing were always his passion, in which he dedicated almost more time that to his current studies. He almost doesn´t know when he started to draw, but he remembers that the first design he vastly draw, as it was logic for his age, was at age of five. He kept on painting and drawing during all his childhood, until he was age of twelve when he returned as an autodidact to the automotive and product design drawing and made them his main themes without even knowing what was that industrial design profession all about.
In 1992 he was received at the prestigious Elisava School of Design in Barcelona, where he learned the basics and was introduced to the world of industrial design. But he wanted to discover even more and, after studying for a year in that wonderful city, he decided at the age of 18, to emigrate to the United Kingdom and get into the oldest school for transportation design ever known, the one of Coventry University. From this school he would have the opportunity of travelling to Germany, where after realizing a semester of studies at Pforzheim Fachhochschule, he was accepted at the Mercedes-Benz automobile company design department at the age of only 21 thanks to the introduction of some designer mates who really loved his work.
Once he finished his studies at the European continent, he would be back to his loving island of Gran Canaria where he will keep on discovering new design matters such as the graphic and fashion ones, and will found his own design studio at the beginning of year 2001.
Since then, many have been the projects, related with all the design fields, in which he has been involved, from graphic design projects to automobile and product design, without setting aside his passion for Fine Arts, furniture and interior architecture.
My idea
¨Create things to make them look impossible but not ceasing to appeal beautiful, romantic and elegant. To provoke the explosion of brains, the incredulity of sawn, break squaring and invent, forever, reinvent¨.
Since the beginning of times in my relation with Art and Design I don´t remember when I failed searching for innovation, thinking abroad in the future and breaking with standards of that which seems common and quotidian to all of us. Always looking for the most impossible and spectacular shapes, those colours that make us feel chicken skin, the materials that experience the most loyal qualities and properties as well as the newest and most exciting designs that communicate exquisite beauty and great functionality, so that they are admired as unique pieces of great artistic value.
At the time of executing my work I inspire by the new engineering innovations, by the new inventions, by Renascence, Modernism and Vanguards Art of XXth century and the new influences of the XXIst, and for all that surrounds me and happens in front and further away of my senses, and of course, by the beauty of those places where I have lived, mainly those from my childhood, the Canary Islands and the diverse and contradictory cultures which I have crossed with at my world trips.
Since very young my first beginnings started into the transport and product design field, being always drawing my most powerful arm, even more than my words. Now days I work from amazing graphics or the most impressive marker renderings, up to powerful info-graphics and the most incredible and outgoing product and transport models.
Engineering is my left hand having as right the Bic pen with which I sketch all my most recent ideas that shine in my brain, always looking not only for beauty but also for functional innovation in all my creations, making them unique, unrepeatable and timeless. That´s the way I work at my office, in which the creative craziness and the activity don´t stop, if not in one thing, in another.
My studio is a multidisciplinary workshop where I work the drawing and the sculpture, as well as the prototyping of all kind of products and artefacts that characterize of having an exquisite aesthetics and an unsurpassed functionality. At it, everything gets distributed into a single multivalent department in which art and engineering get mixed and make one all. From an automobile to a chair or a advertising poster meet in it without knowing well where art or the most advanced constructive technique starts.
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