LUCKY OWL WITH HORRIBLE CHEESE

Jesús Aguado

Lucky Owl with Horrible Cheese

2024

Acrylic on birch panel

30 x 20 cm / 11.81 x 7.87 in (unframed) — Framed: 42.5 x 32.5 cm / 16.73 x 12.80 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Jesús Aguado (b. 1976, Valladolid) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca and spent the next two decades building a career as a commercial and editorial illustrator, working for publishers including Santillana in Spain and clients across Taiwan. Around 2017–2018 he turned to oil and acrylic painting, channeling two decades of editorial discipline into a deeply personal body of work that fuses Renaissance technique, dramatic chiaroscuro and a horror vacui reminiscent of the old masters with the imagination of comic books — a style often described as “Baroque Surrealism.” Working in acrylic glazes on wood and birch panels, he builds densely populated, luminous worlds inhabited by dragons, rabbits, caterpillars and other animal figures, largely without human presence, that stand in for the endearing and the disturbing in equal measure.

Lucky Owl with Horrible Cheese brings Aguado’s characteristic dark humour to his densely layered bestiary, pairing a folkloric symbol of good fortune — the owl — with an image as mundane and unglamorous as a piece of “horrible” cheese, in the same wry, deadpan register that runs through his titling. Painted in acrylic glazes on birch panel, the small-format piece concentrates his luminous, chiaroscuro technique into a single absurd, self-contained scene, presented framed and ready to hang.

To collect Lucky Owl with Horrible Cheese is to own a unique panel from an artist whose two decades of editorial illustration discipline, fused with classical painting technique, have earned him recognition within the international lowbrow and pop surrealist movement — a small, self-contained fragment of a densely populated visual world built with the technical rigour of the old masters.