Marcos Covelo & The Image Generation
For The Illuminator

Marcos Covelo, who also goes by the name and signature of M8K8, is a truly modern artist. For him, research for all his paintings and projects begins with a Google image search and continues through the pursuit of the perfect image found in everyday life, captured on his camera phone. His paintings, drip with colour and stimulation, unsettling as bright reds, greens and royal blues take a violent turn. Capitalism is turned into a masked and maimed figure that is surrounded by expletives and murky splatters of paint which are infected as the brush strokes above trickle out of their confines. Onomatopoeic phrases leap from the canvas to speak to us, a collective who he refers to as ‘The Image Generation’. A member himself, he talks of how he has been brought up on a diet of TV for every meal, unable to separate information from the image. The Gulf War, Dolly the Sheep, The Twin Towers fall. The pictures spring easily to mind but, with the exception of September 11^th, can you remember the dates? The scientist? The soldier? As the images take precedence over the details which they illustrate, our real understanding is warped. Covelo speaks ofVis A Vis:  To him this is a painting which is ‘an amalgamation of images and concepts juxtaposed against each other, creating contradictory dialogues, ironic games and distorted realities. The result is not so far from the reality of the information we are bombarded with every day.’