Bjorn Calleja was born on August 11, 1981 in Manila, Philippines where he was learning mad creativity lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, comic books and the three stooges at an early age.
In 2004 he graduated with a bachelors degree in Fine Arts major in Advertising at the Far Eastern University in Manila and has been showing his art in several solo and group exhibitions.
Art is the perfect projection of an artists perception on facts and ideologies. Growing up on both the 80s and 90s has been a major influence in my art, a time when all the cards have already been laid for us to explore and exploit. I grew up immersed on several hours of booming television programming, from monsters and sci-fi movies of the 70s and 80s, to Sesame Street, cartoons and the three stooges, superheroes, up until the time when pornography introduced itself to me. Other stuff like old fairy tale books, funny komiks, and superheroes, Illustrations from encyclopedias, the streets of Manila, and Alfred E. Neuman, all of which has also been greatly influential to my hallucinatory image factory where I develop elements to start with.
My art is the result of my fascination with the weird and the lost, warped poetry on canvas representing a certain state of mind at certain points in my life, with subjects varying from people, places, experiences or just plain ideas. I find art as a language, which would only be effective when spoken well, an opportubity to tell stories that might never be told through words. I try to abuse the primitive sense of aesthetics and exploit the familiar by revealing through it the not, ridiculing the audience by luring them into what seems as playful and whimsical at first but baring the grotesque and absurd which most often times is the truth, leaving the audience hanging in limbo with a thought bubble atop their heads.
