Category: everyday

Presenting ten years of notebooks, in which Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck shares her daily life through drawings, following the rhythm of nature, her garden, and the familiar faces around her.

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck has been drawing in sketchbooks for as long as she can remember, in the manner of a diary to which she confides her everyday life. A daily practice that mirrors the tender care she gives to her garden, a vibrant place that plays an essential role in her life and artistic practice.

In these sketchbooks, shapes and colours intermingle in a delicate and joyful harmony. It’s her intimate world that Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck reveals in her drawings, many of which are created en plein-air in just a few minutes. The simplicity of grey pencil strokes meets field flowers held in one hand and where familiar faces meet small animals, like Lemon, the canary with whom she lives.

To delve into ten years of notebooks, kept from 2014 to 2024, is to encounter the abundant and multifaceted work of an artist who invites us to observe the ordinary with an insatiable appetite.

An in-depth conversation between Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck and Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi completes the selection of drawings.

Biography

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck (born in 1990 in Strasbourg, France) is a painter and interdisciplinary artist working across rural Oxfordshire (UK) and rural Alsace (France).
Her practice composed of painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, film, photography and writing often conceals ecological messages, rendered in soft and delicate methods. In several of the artist’s projects interaction with the environment and others plays a central role. 

Like a gentle window into the play of emotions, Little Passing Thoughts is filled with drawings to meditate, escape, or simply smile.

Orfeo Tagiuri scribbles day and night on a small notebook. He tears away some of the drawings, to throw in the bin because they’re not good enough, to give away to friends — to have a laugh or to remember a moment — or to sell to a stranger who shared the exact same feeling or thought, for what Orfeo draws with a black pen are universal emotions. This pocket-sized book, compiling over 350 drawings, is meant to be carried everywhere and opened just when one needs to take a break, get inspired, and breathe.

“Each of these drawings is fished out from the river of little passing thoughts. I don’t know where they come from but sometimes I take the time to gently scoop them up and set them down. They are a great joy, relief and meditation to make. I hope you can feel that” — Orfeo Tagiuri

Biography

Orfeo Tagiuri (born in 1991 in Brookline, MA, USA) lives and works in London. Orfeo’s practice spans from painting and drawing to performance, film, woodcarving, animation, and music. The artist has exhibited and performed internationally, including at Sapling Gallery, London (2021), MACRO, Rome (2021), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018) and at Fiorucci Art Trust’s Volcano Extravaganza (2016). In 2020 Orfeo was nominated for Bloomberg New Contemporaries award.

Through her extraordinary collection of still frames captured from the videos she records every day, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban explores the daily life of a rice field and the passersby she observes from the fifth floor of her balcony.

Everyday, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban films from the balcony of her small fifth-floor Japanese apartment—it’s like a ritual. Below, a rice field unfolds along with the comings and goings of passersby, farmers, and children. On foot, by bike, or by car. Cintia observes this daily life as though it were a series, made up of fleeting and unique moments that reveal the hidden details of days that follow one another without ever being the same.

Since 2021, Cintia has been collecting videos of this landscape she watches over. From these recordings, she has created still frames that capture the changing seasons, shifting colours, and recurring figures who pass along the rice field—figures you think you recognize without knowing their stories.

Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban’s first book, features around a hundred images selected from an archive of over a thousand videos. It offers a small window into the theater of everyday life.

Biography

Cintia Tortosa Santisteban (born in 1989) is a Spanish photographer based in Kanagawa, Japan. Her formal education is in English literature, linguistics and education at the University of Granada (Spain) and Galway (Ireland). She is currently working as an English teacher in Japan. She has no formal background in photography or the arts. She has learned through books, the Internet and friends. She has been interested in visual arts since she was a kid but it wasn’t until the end of 2019 that she started taking it more seriously. 

In this collection of stories scribbled on paper, Coco Capitán captures her spontaneous thoughts. Her handwritten typography, featuring inverted letters, crossings-out, and annotations, takes shape in a world tinged with humor and irony.

“If you’ve seen it all, close your eyes” presents extracts from a decade of artist Coco Capitán’s handwritten notebooks. Coco Capitán has always scribbled down her thoughts – everywhere, all the time – often on scraps of paper that have filled notebook after notebook. From her first day in London in 2010 until now, and as she travels the world on photography assignments, Coco Capitán’s writings grant an insight into her free and instinctive creative process. Playful aphorisms and short poems address an array of issues with hints of humour and irony. She combines the serious with the mundane as she shares in her first text-based book social, metaphorical or sentimental moments with her witty tone and distinctive hand.

London-based artist Coco Capitán (born 1992, Spain) earned a BA in Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion followed by an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She  works  across  a  range  of  genres  including  photography,  painting,  mural,  text,  video  and  installation.  Capitán has  shot  campaigns  for  world-renowned  fashion  brands  and  magazines  including Vogue,  Dazed, Gucci, APC and Mulberry. Her first solo institutional exhibition was held at the Daelim Museum in South Korea (2018). Her second is in March 2019 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.