Pepo Moreno
MESSING WITH THE ALGORITHM

Pepo Moreno was born in Spain in 1985, grew up in the countryside and spent his young adulthood flirting with music while pursuing a BA in Communication. An enemy of the closet and a friend of the arts, he moved to Berlin where he gained experience on how broad the spectrum of queerness could really be. It was then when his first series of drawings, in between the sad, the gay and the ugly, blossomed. He lives now in Paris and his paintings have grown to become both a mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes in Western pop culture. On the superficial, his work explores a myriad of saturated colours using different variations of acrylic painting techniques. Deep down, it embraces some of the contradictions of the modern queer life experience: from the happiness of being out to the “forever young, forever beautiful” obsession that often hides the loneliness and isolation of being an outcast.

In this new series of work, MESSING WITH THE ALGORITHM, Pepo explores the borders between voluntary thirst traps, general erotica and his own art. A collaborative project that includes the community of friends and social media followers allows him to reflect on the limits of censorship and how algorithms and bots define what’s acceptable (or not) for the general public.