Brooklyn New York 80s Fantasyland and Nostalgic Reality

“When it comes to the land of 80’s creativity let’s all be there when we’ve got the touch! Cause with art pictures and projects from that retro decade you’ll love it so much.”

Anel, who was born in Brooklyn in 1981, calls himself an “80s Correspondent.” Through his multidisciplinary practice spanning drawing, animation, cartooning, and sculpture, Anel revisits and revamps his favorite decade with fervent devotion. His subjects aren’t the era’s typical big names, but rather the unsung heroes you might have flipped past on TV or driven by irl: the Coronet Brothers from the Juvenile Discount Furniture TV ads, Zohra Lambert in a Goya Beans commercial, the old Amaco gas station on a corner in Crown Heights. 

In Anel’s fantasy timeline, politicians mingle with D-list celebs and cartoons descend upon Brooklyn’s streets. The magic of Hollywood and the artist’s imagination unite to create something “close to solid gold,” as Anel puts it. Imagine if Jesus collaborated with Reverend Robert Schuller and Fred Price for a spiritual duet in 1982. Anel’s drawings use loose strokes and scratchy, whirring lines to build something with momentum and incredible precision, a surge of hunches converging to hit their mark. 

Anel, who is a longtime member of YAI Arts in Manhattan, also makes trippy animated videos using a self-honed process he developed at the Brooklyn Public Library. In them, Anel remakes sitcoms like Who’s the Boss? and commercials for Breakstone sour cream, superimposing characters’ heads with warped simulacrums so their mouths chomp open and shut at a new rhythm. Anel replaces the original dialogue with his own fantastical plots and twists. (He voices all the characters himself.) The results are previously unaired madcap delights that combine allegiant superfandom and hallucinatory absurdity. 

Finally, Anel’s sculptures use clay, cardboard, paper mache, foam, and recycled materials to bring his 80s fantasies into three dimensions. His muses include uncanny smurfs and the star-studded cast of 1985’s We Are the World performance by USA for Africa, including Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, and so many more. Anel contorts childhood memories into something strange and overgrown, a time capsule germinating new mutated sprouts.