Malaga artist Buly strengthens ties with USA through art

The Macharaviaya-based artist Aurelio Díaz, otherwise known as Buly, is heading to the small Axarquía village’s twin-town of Pensacola in the Florida, USA, to take part in the Great Gulfcoast Art Festival which runs from Friday 1 to Sunday 3 November on the town’s Seville Square.

Buly has lived in Macharaviaya on the eastern side of Malaga province for forty years. Born in Huelva in 1952, where from a young child his family and friends would affectionately call him Buly, he studied Forestry at university but always knew that he wanted to paint.

In the 1970s he went to London where he secured a place at the famous Chelsea School of Art. However, later in the same decade he returned to Spain, which was coming towards the end of the Franco era, a time that Buly has described as “interesting”. After a brief spell in Madrid, he was yearning for his homeland of Andalucía and fell in love with a house in and indeed the village of Macharaviaya.

Artistic hotspot

The Axarquía village was already an artistic hotspot thanks to the American artist Robert Harvey and on the map due to the connection with the illustrious Gálvez family. In fact it is the connection with the American Independence hero Bernardo de Gálvez which connects Macharaviaya and Pensacola, where the famous battle which Bernardo helped win for the Americans took place.

Buly has exhibited in the Axarquía and around Spain as well as Morocco and Vienna with Insitituto Cervantes and in other European countries including the UK. He works with watercolour, acrylics, oil and produces sculptures and says his inspiration comes from cinema, emotions, his surroundings, Pop art and bullfighting which he describes as “theatrical”.

His most recent project explores the decontextualisation of places, for example bringing the sea into homes “closing nature inside a building, especially the living room” and that is the theme of the exhibition he is taking to Pensacola, ‘The Water Room’.

Buly has also designed album covers for artists such as Martirio, theatre sets (Espacio-Cero, Teatro del Tiempo) for legendary groups on the Madrid independent scene, corporate lines for companies, institutional projects and campaigns such as the Malaga Strategic Plan, the Ibero-American Film Festival of Huelva, and the Teatro de Cádiz, and sports and reading initiation campaigns for the Junta de Andalucía.