Skount (Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, 1985), currently based in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Inspired by the classical Spanish theatre of his hometown, Skount’s oneiric masked characters beckon the viewer from the urban environment into their mysterious and playful dreamscapes. The great playwrights of Skount’s youth formed a lasting impression, where he regards life as a wonderful play, in which everyone has a role.

Driven by the fundamental desire to free his own mind, Skount’s creativity knows no bounds. With a background in Streetart, his artistic expression spans paint, paper, music and performance, to video art, sculpture, and installation. Yet Skount always comes back to masks. Humans the world over, have used masks since ancient times for sacred rituals, as ornamentation, and in performances and theatre. The mask disguises the identity of its wearer, and symbolizes the need to hide or repress a person’s desires, fears and concerns. Skount observes that everybody carries a mask, with it we conceal our identity and adopt a more socially acceptable image to get by day to day. But we can also choose the moments and people with whom we can reveal our true nature, and take off our masks.

Skount’s irrepressible curiosity for other cultures has inspired him to travel and study different forms of creativity and traditions around the world. Skount has worked and exhibited throughout Spain, Europe, China, Israel, Mexico and the United States.

Text by: Phillipp Barth

“Dreams are not just a message (a coded message, at that), but also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination that has its own value. Dreams are proof that fantasies—emotional immersion in the visualization of events that have never and may never occur— are one of the profoundest necessities for human life…The characters that come from my imagination are my own possibilities, those that never came to bear, or those still on my horizon…” – Skount