Oscar Birch
@oscaarbirch

Oscar Birch
@oscarbirch

This guy has an insatiable appetite for creating. Ever since I started working with this young man, I’ve witnessed an almost explosive evolution. Oscar possesses the true soul of an artist, and what he is doing right now – at this exact time and age – is sacred. I mean that in the sense that he has yet to be corrupted by market values, commercial curators, or the exhausting noise of other people's opinions – it is raw creation.

He is creating freely, purely, and entirely for himself. Every time I speak to him, he has established a set of new dogmas for his own work. He treats the canvas like a laboratory where the rules change almost daily, but always with a fierce internal logic. One week it’s a deliberate, highly restrictive choice of a color palette that forces him to think inside a new box. The next week, it’s a fresh, twisted way of deconstructing classical cartoon icons, stripping them of their nostalgia to make them speak a completely new language. He flips through art history and instagrams contemporary influences with the same ease, absorbing the visionaries he admires from the established art scene, breaking their styles down, and rebuilding them in his own image.

There is a beautiful, rare friction in Oscar's work. It is simultaneously incredibly mature and beautifully naive. You can feel the youthful defiance vibrating off the surfaces, yet there is a deep, instinctual understanding of composition and form that usually takes decades to develop. He isn't trying to please a crowd or fit into a trendy gallery checklist. He is just answering the call of the blank space in front of him. And I've seen him work. It is like his second nature.

Right now, he is in a magnificent, heavy state of flow and raw creation – a fragile, beautiful frequency that shouldn't be interrupted or intellectualized too much by outsiders such as myself. It’s the kind of magic you only get to experience at the very beginning of a great journey, and my best advice would be: Get on board!

My only job right now is to stand back, protect that space, and let him cook.