SUPERSTARS. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and references
Taking as his central axis the snapshots that Andy Warhol took in the mid-20th century, and extrapolating that work to 21st-century Spanish society, the author has dedicated almost a decade to using Polaroids to portray figures, idols, myths, and icons that have symbolized dissent and authenticity, and that have, definitively, changed his life.
Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and influences It is the result of a work of pop anthropology that analyzes the power of aesthetics as a tool of self-construction and vindicates the figure of the referent as a fundamental cultural phenomenon, with the help of the most well-known and recognizable faces in our country.
The book opens with an extensive conversation, in interview format, conducted with Mario Vaquerizo in June 2019. The text addresses topics such as aesthetics, the importance of role models in the construction of identity, the difference between high and low culture, fame, celebrities, and popular culture.
It is followed by more than 150 Polaroid portraits, captured between December 2017 and December 2024 in cities such as Pamplona, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santander, Zaragoza, Valencia, Benidorm, Paris, London, and Ibiza. These snapshots make up the visual section of the project and give substance to a work that documents, celebrates, and preserves the faces of an era from the author's perspective.
Thirty interviews, with a common thread, seek to analyze reality from different perspectives, thereby gaining insight into the people behind the most recognizable faces on the national scene. Singers, performers, showgirls, artists, celebrities, socialites, activists, transvestites, and designers reflect on topics such as plastic surgery, political correctness, superficiality, naturalness, and the future.
The journey culminates in an epilogue. A collection of texts that complete and give meaning to the overall work. In them, the author shares his creative process and reveals the secrets of this adventure. He also answers questions and develops concepts that had been intentionally left open, with the sole purpose of not limiting the reader and allowing them to experience the entire experience without limits.
About the author:
Kenai Alkazar (Pamplona, 1998) is the product of a conscious and active cultural self-creation that he has been building for over a decade. A mythomaniac by nature, an expert in pop imagery, and a self-proclaimed disciple of Warhol, he defines himself as a homoerotic photographer, kitsch collector, and drag artist. He is the author of Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and influences, a work permeated by an idea that has always accompanied him: "one is more authentic the more one resembles what one has dreamed of oneself."
