“My output is an expression of honne: my true feelings and desires, made visible.”
A Portable Identity Built in Motion
David La Piovra has formed an artistic identity around mobility, independence, and the productive tension between what is revealed and what remains protected. Entirely self-taught, he works across drawing, photography, graphic design, fashion, and video editing, combining these disciplines into a practice that resists fixed boundaries. His mixed European background and formative years across five countries in Europe and Latin America gave him an early awareness of how culture shapes both verbal and visual communication. Repeated movement required him to read unfamiliar environments, recognize subtle social codes, and continually reconsider his own position within them. Those experiences now inform work that treats identity not as a stable portrait, but as something negotiated through context, strategy, and personal choice. Internet culture expanded that perspective further, exposing him to microgenres, aesthetic subcultures, and creative communities beyond his immediate surroundings. Japanese popular culture became especially influential, helping him establish a dialogue between Western references, Japanese philosophies, and the private experiences carried through his life in motion.
Visual expression first served David La Piovra as a personal language during childhood and adolescence. Drawing and image-making allowed him to process abstract thoughts that felt too complicated, inward, or sensitive to communicate through ordinary conversation. The habit was less about producing objects for an audience than giving difficult ideas a visible structure. That connection disappeared for almost five years during early adulthood, creating a meaningful interruption in his creative development. When he returned, his purpose had changed. Art was no longer restricted to private reflection; it became a way to challenge viewers, communicate outwardly, and develop a professional system around creative production. He resumed drawing and photography before adding graphic design, video, and fashion in gradual stages. Each discipline widened what the previous one could accomplish, allowing still images to become promotional narratives, visual motifs to move across clothing, and philosophical concerns to appear through several formats. The result is a multimedia practice built through accumulation rather than formal instruction, with each new skill responding to a practical or expressive need.
David La Piovra identifies his decisive turning point as a recognition of readiness rather than a sudden revelation. Artistic ability had reached a level that could work alongside networking, marketing, research and development, product design, and lean self-funded resources. Together, those capabilities allowed him to imagine an artistic enterprise that could sustain and protect itself instead of depending on creation alone. His visual language reflects the same controlled approach. Individual works use no more than four primary or tertiary colors, arranged through complementary relationships or direct contrast. Strong separations between shadow, midtone, and highlight create tension, while other compositions rely on intersecting motifs built at a mosaic-like scale. Text, drawing, digital photography, graphic design, and intensive post-editing frequently occupy the same image. Speed is also essential. He aims to complete each work quickly so that it remains close to the original thought that initiated it. Across these methods, he repeatedly returns to independence, freedom of movement, refusal of social expectations, and the possibility of navigating society without following either revived fashions or newly manufactured trends.
David La Piovra: Discipline, Strategy, and Self-Authorship
The intellectual structure behind David La Piovra’s work is organized through deliberate pairings of Western and Japanese figures. Niccolò Machiavelli stands beside Yukio Mishima as a reference for strategic self-formation. From Machiavelli, particularly the worldview associated with The Prince, David La Piovra draws an emphasis on self-reliance and the idea that life can be approached as a tactical board. Progress requires deliberate movement, clear goals, and an understanding of the systems through which power circulates. Mishima offers a complementary model through Sun and Steel, where discipline becomes a means of authoring the body and mind. His aesthetic philosophy, connected to ancient Greek ideals, presents personal development as a designed act rather than a passive condition. David La Piovra brings these positions into his own pursuit of autonomy, treating artistic practice as both expression and organized action. The comparison also supports his view of society as a strategic game in which individuals can discover useful loopholes, provided their choices do not harm others. Freedom, in this framework, must be built through awareness, restraint, and preparation.
A second pairing joins Oscar Wilde with manga artist Hirohiko Araki. Wilde contributes the performance of Dandyism, a cultivated coquetry, and an understanding of beauty pursued to dangerous extremes. The tragic consequences of decadence, perfectionism, and aesthetic obsession in Salomé and The Picture of Dorian Gray sharpen David La Piovra’s interest in the costs of constructing an idealized self. Araki introduces a different but compatible energy through the playful and exaggerated bodies of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. His characters often possess androgynous qualities and borrow heavily from avant-garde Western fashion and popular culture. Beneath their striking surfaces, however, David La Piovra recognizes philosophical substance and a broad celebration of the human condition. Marquis de Sade and filmmaker Sono Sion form the third pairing. De Sade’s nihilistic and self-centered philosophy removes divine distinction from humanity and portrays the individual as mechanical, governed by deterministic forces while believing in free will. Sono Sion transforms related fatalism into cinema marked by violence, grotesque imagery, erotic tension, and the subversive conventions of exploitation film.
These influences connect with a personal philosophy shaped by Stoicism and the Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne. Honne represents private feelings and authentic desires, while tatemae describes the public facade presented to the surrounding world. David La Piovra understands his artistic output as an expression of honne, giving visible form to thoughts that belong to his most genuine identity. Tatemae operates as a protective surface, separating that interior self from professional obligations, social life, and the civilian identity attached to his official name. The moniker La Piovra adds another layer of protection. It functions simultaneously as a brand, a philosophical device, and an emotional boundary between the artist and the person who moves through ordinary public structures. Stoicism governs the relationship between these identities by supplying the composure required to maintain both. Viewers cannot easily determine whether they are encountering the guarded civilian presence or the authentic figure expressed through art. This controlled uncertainty is central to his work, where disclosure does not eliminate privacy and self-expression can remain both direct and strategically shielded.
Inside the Ink of Transformation
The most personally significant work in David La Piovra’s practice is El Pulpo en su Tinta (The Octopus in its Ink), completed in 2022. Created digitally through a combination of photo-collage and drawing, the piece was produced with GIMP, a graphic tablet, a smartphone camera, and a scanner. Its visual language occupies a space between abstraction, surrealism, and psychedelic art, yet its source material is firmly connected to lived experience. Scanned Colombian peso coins and banknotes owned by the artist appear throughout the composition. These are combined with photographs he took in Bogotá, including an image of a golden sea snail displayed at the Museum of Gold and another showing glistening tar on a city pavement. Colombia therefore enters the image through direct documentation rather than borrowed symbolism. David La Piovra’s affection for the country and the time he spent there lend the work its underlying sense of adventure. The octopus and human figures, by contrast, were drawn entirely from imagination, placing autobiographical fragments inside a psychologically charged fictional environment.
Three central motifs organize the composition. A glowing, semi-transparent octopus dominates the image, with skin formed from warped Colombian banknotes and eyes and suction cups assembled from peso coins. Within its grasp rests a translucent golden sea snail. Inside that shell, a blue male marble figurine and a red female marble figurine appear in scenes of intercourse. The octopus embodies David La Piovra’s mind as it processes several streams of thought at once. Its money-covered body broadcasts what was then his primary concern: the pursuit of financial stability. The Colombian currency also carries the memory of travel, linking economic pressure with independence and exploration. The figurines represent a different internal task, namely the integration of masculine and feminine traits into a durable balance for the next stage of his transformation. Their changing dominant and passive positions generate the series’ most forceful movement. Around them, the octopus and snail remain comparatively serene, suggesting the composure needed to contain that demanding psychological negotiation without allowing it to overwhelm the larger process.
The underwater setting deepens the work’s private atmosphere, while layers of purple ink imply subconscious activity continuing beneath visible thought. Almost every element turns inward, reinforcing the sense of a mind examining its own competing concerns. The octopus’s eyes provide the only clear gesture toward an external space, focusing on something beyond the edge of the frame. David La Piovra originally conceived the piece as part of an eight-part collage series accompanied by an animation in which each image would transform into the next. It also shares its title with an unpublished sonnet corona written in 2021, extending the project beyond visual art into literature. Together, these components create an abstract record of a specific period of self-transformation. The 2022 work now appears as a marker between two stages of his development. It precedes the moment when his artistic enterprise and core concerns became fully defined, yet it already contains the ideas that would guide them: financial autonomy, individualism, strategic navigation, and the difficult work of forming a self capable of sustaining freedom.
David La Piovra: Building Freedom into Every Format
David La Piovra’s daily process reflects his commitment to ownership and mobility. He does not maintain a conventional studio, choosing instead to work exclusively with portable equipment and devices that he owns outright. This structure allows the entire creative, promotional, and commercial operation to function from almost anywhere in the world. His laptop remains the central tool, positioned directly in front of him with all other necessary equipment kept within reach. Most work takes place from early evening until late at night, when ideas arrive with their greatest intensity. Solitude is not merely a working preference but an operational principle. He independently manages creation, research and development, publication, marketing, networking, and both pre-sales and post-sales activity. Nothing is separated from the larger identity of David La Piovra. Artistic decisions, promotional strategy, technical preparation, and commercial planning operate as connected parts of one system. This independence supports the freedom he values while also placing responsibility for every stage of development, presentation, and communication in his own hands.
Ideas enter that system through a year-long funnel of observation and collection. Travel, sightseeing, museums, galleries, cinema, food, music, concerts, and conferences can all provide material. Drawing, photography, and recording become methods of preserving those encounters until patterns begin to emerge. David La Piovra then groups the accumulated material according to theme and selects the medium that can express the concept most authentically. A defined development period is assigned within the calendar, giving each project a structured window rather than allowing it to expand indefinitely. His most productive intervals often coincide with Ramadan and the brief period surrounding the Day of the Dead. Ramadan encourages discipline, good deeds, and distance from pleasure, qualities that align with his preferred state of concentration. The Day of the Dead offers a similarly focused interval for work. Completion depends on three conditions: the piece must satisfy his aesthetic standards and feel privately authentic, meet the technical specifications of its intended platform or submission venue, and produce material that can strengthen the visibility of David La Piovra across relevant digital channels.
The largest project currently guiding his attention is the 2026/27 edition of Statements!, an in-house fashion and accessories line scheduled for late 2026 through early 2027. It is planned as his broadest multimedia and audiovisual undertaking so far, bringing together fashion, graphic identity, slogan-based communication, and promotional moving image. The collection will feature eight versions, each built around a pairing of two gradient colors. Every version will carry one of eight simple but thought-provoking slogans, accompanied by the recurring David La Piovra octopus logo. The project aims to turn art into a wearable declaration without reducing it to decoration. Clothing and accessories will serve as physical canvases for the words and logo, while the people wearing them will become active participants in the work. Their individual choices, bodies, and modes of presentation will contribute another layer of self-expression. Digitally, an audiovisual campaign will expand the collection’s language beyond the garments themselves. Through this exchange between artwork, product, promotion, and wearer, David La Piovra continues building a practice in which autonomy is not simply discussed but designed into every stage.
