I DON'T KNOW THESE FOLKS. Powered by adidas Originals.
Words, SVD. Photography, Guadaira Martín & Osama Ahdi.
June 5, 2025.
The Spanish artist redefining millennial aesthetics takes over our Barcelona store with his "I DON’T KNOW THESE FOLKS" exhibition, just ahead of the Primavera Sound Festival.
Have you ever thought about what’s in your head? Me neither — but I guess I had to, eventually. Apparently, it’s full of stuff. Stuff I like, stuff I dislike, stuff I’d rather forget, and stuff I forget all the time. I don’t appreciate all of it, but I’ve learned to tolerate it.
I DON’T KNOW THESE FOLKS is an installation commissioned by SVD, powered by adidas Superstar, and created by me, Pepo. It blends new, old, and everything in between. It reveals a part of me while hiding another. Sometimes it’s serious, other times it’s a total joke. It’s an honest mistake, a success, a complete failure, a promise, and a charade.
I hope you like it — I mean it (or not).
Pepo, Paris. June 2025.
Pepo Moreno was born in Spain in the last years of what we now call the Millennial Generation. He grew up drawing in his hometown in the countryside and spent his young adulthood flirting with art while pursuing a BA in Communication and Advertising.
Forever an enemy of the closet and a friend to the arts, he moved to ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin, where he gained first-hand experience on how broad the spectrum of queerness could really be. It was then when his first series of drawings in between the sad, the gay and the ugly blossomed.
Today, Pepo lives in Paris, and his paintings have grown to become both a mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes in Western pop culture. On the superficial –the aesthetics–, his work explores a myriad of saturated colours using different variations of acrylic painting techniques. Deep down –at heart– it embraces some of the contradictions of the modern queer life experience: from the sheer gayness of being out, proud and simply alive, to the forever young, forever beautiful obsession that often hides the loneliness and isolation of being an outcast.
Vicente Ferrer. June 2025.
Come hang out with us at the SVD Store in Barcelona from June 5th to 19th, at Bailén 18. You’ll get to check out Pepo’s work and grab the limited-edition capsule we’ve put together with Primavera Sound Festival.
Love,
The SVD Team.
