Artist Diego Arnedo and his wife/business partner Adhya Spencer have lived the lives of many people from designing club visuals for world-renowned DJs in Costa Rica to art installations and festivals in Brazil and Argentina to going off-grid and living in the jungles of Central America for years on end. For the past 6 years, they have found solace and peace in Colorado Springs with their UV Art Experience: Jaguart Deco which mixes music and Arnedo’s specific kind of live art and painting. They just recently launched UV: Parallel Universe at Coati Uprise, a space on Tejon.
Spencer says this kind of installation is new in that they are collaborating with some other artists. “It’s usually just the two of us.”
Decorating Nightclubs in Buenos Aires
Arnedo started off decorating nightclubs in the ’90s in Buenos Aires. “And so what do you see at night in a dark place?” asks Spencer. “The ultraviolet light and the fluorescent paint just jump out. So you can see it from far away and it grabs your attention.” This is what inspired Arnedo’s approach with vibrant color and almost neon vision. “And so, I guess, what the art has morphed into is he wants his art to be an experience, as opposed to just looking at it on a wall, in a gallery.”
As a result, Spencer says that they don’t usually have any of his art ever in galleries, even though he has achieved a level of recognition. “He just doesn’t prefer it. I mean, it’s got to be a black light setup. You got to be able to see it in white light and black light.” Arnedo says part of the experience he enjoys is being next to a person looking at a piece of artwork as it is being created. “They’re just going to be like, ‘Oh, wow. That’s so cool!’” That’s what Arnedo looks for. He also incorporates some 3D elements on certain artwork that make it pop even more with special glasses.
For most of his installations and artwork, Arnedo works with specific overall themes. “It’s about taking in what’s happening around him. It has to do with current events and the seasons and what’s going on in his life, and that will translate into an idea for a theme. And then it will just go from there.” The theme for the current installation at Coati is “Parallel Universes” whereas their previous endeavor was entitled “UV: Queen” inspired by “The Queen’s Gambit” and chess.
Spencer says she doesn’t think Arnedo opens himself up to other forms of art. His art thus is very defined within this UV context. “He doesn’t change his forms of art. And because he mostly paints live, it enables it to be a show. So that’s become his seed [of inspiration].”
After living in many different cities, Arnedo says he has found solace in Colorado Springs. He continues, saying, “I like it here because it’s more space for me.” Spencer says it is also a matter of competition. “If you compare a city like Buenos Aires to Colorado Springs, in Buenos Aires, there are a hundred times more incredible artists than there are here in Colorado Springs. What he does here, he’s the only one.” She refines this statement by specifying that, in a city like Buenos Aires, art is very, very important, whereas, in the United States, people have other things to do. “They’re educated in another way, and art isn’t in the forefront. It’s more in the background.”
The Breadth of Art is Everywhere
Spencer says in parts of South America, the breadth of art is everywhere. “In Brazil, we lived in a smaller town down south on the beach. It wasn’t a big city like Buenos Aires. But Diego painted every single weekend. It was all about the culture and the music.” Arnedo’s beginning in art came from the electronic music scene, which is number one in Argentina and Brazil. “Whereas here in the United States, it’s not. It’s pop and rap. So that’s another big difference.” In Costa Rica, the couple decorated the popular nightclub Vertigo for world-known EDM artists like Paul Van Dyk, Roger Sanchez, Cantanios, Deep Dish, and Steve Waller. “I would say one of the biggest disconnects that we have here in the States is the music because we were in the electronic music culture.”
Arnedo says that, in the chaos of that time, there was an essence of control that came through in the art while still being instinctual. The final result always had to be something beautiful, but he says it is very difficult to explain. Spencer says many reporters look for a deep meaning in the art but she says that the art is mostly done with instinct. “It is what it is, [there’s not so much] contemplating and thinking and analyzing. I mean Diego’s a Virgo, I don’t think he really analyzes [these things].” Arnedo agrees that it is more about the moment.
Spencer says that it makes a big difference for them to live in Colorado Springs with their daughter, Azul. It is about “the peace we both have [now]. The conversations we have now are about normal life, and not ever within his art or what he is painting [at the time].” She says they never consciously talk about that.
Speak with Your Passion
Contemplating, Spencer says, “I think a big part of our work and how we can do what we do is how we motivate people. The way you motivate people here is the same way you motivate people in South America. You speak with your passion.”
Spencer handles the marketing end of the business as well as graphic design and promotion. “I take every situation how it comes. I’m an American. I went to school here. I graduated from college here. But then I went to Costa Rica and everything was erased [changed] because we were living in the jungle for so many years [in the early 00s]. This was before smartphones. We had no TV. We didn’t have a computer.” She says through osmosis, they were able to absorb what was around them and reset, especially as they became parents to a daughter.
“And it was just nature. Both of us were outside of our culture [at that point]. So we really disconnected from everything that we came from in the business and we rewrote ourselves. We didn’t even celebrate holidays. We didn’t do anything. And in Costa Rica, because you’re so close to the equator, you don’t have a change of seasons. You have the rainy season, you have the wet season, and the high season. The sunsets and rises at basically the same time every day. So time passes and you don’t really realize it.”
Spencer says during that time they were caught in a wonderful limbo of going to the beach, eating papaya, and riding their bikes. They didn’t have a car until right when their daughter was born, in the last two years they were there. “Our daughter was born in the jungle too, in Oaxaca. We had a midwife and our daughter was born in the water. We were completely out of all systems, of course, and we didn’t feel any pressure or pull.”
Inspiration came in a specific form. “Diego usually looks for the mysticism in things,” Spencer continues. “Starting in Costa Rica, he started painting a black figure…a woman that’s very voluptuous. When he’s been looking for the beauty, the harmony, the mysticism, we’ve gotten to something. And it all comes down to that beauty in the paintings.”
When the couple returned to the States with their young daughter, they started on the East Coast in Baltimore near where her brother lived. Arnedo, however, wasn’t inspired there and really did very little painting during that time. Spencer admits the culture was more black in Baltimore with a lot of hip-hop and rap which was on a different frequency than Arnedo’s usual vibe. Spencer’s father lived in Colorado Springs which motivated their move to Colorado, settling here in 2017.
Finding Peace and Art Around Him
Spencer says Arnedo is definitely inspired by what’s around him. She says he found a lot of peace in the United States (and Colorado Springs in particular) through it being more stable. “And then the security of the United States is very different from third world countries. So that has affected how he paints also.”
The impression of the world still impacts his work like with the recent UV: Parallel Universe launch at Colati. “The inauguration of the experience happened yesterday,” Spencer explains. “But he knew what he was going to paint like two weeks before, and he prepared,” Spencer says that Arnedo usually has an idea in mind of what he is going to paint… For the launch of “UV: Parallel Universes”, the canvas was two sheets of 8×8 plywood. “Normally it is not so big, but he wanted to throw the paint onto it.” They also worked with a local DJ who integrated world music with the live painting with harmonic element accompaniment like tango and bossa nova. Their DJ collaborator was also a musician so he interspersed guitar beats as well.
And while their art is serious and passionate and motivated by an active life that has brought them to Colorado Springs, Spencer says, “There’s a point where we just don’t want to be deep either. We just want people to dance and laugh and have fun.”
