Imbued with ingenuity and a keen sense of humour, Don’t take it all to heart is a brilliant example of Javier Calleja’s signature portraits of wide-eyed children with assertive and sympathetic phrases emblazoned on t-shirts across their chests. The present work was executed in 2018, a pivotal year for the artist, having had his first solo exhibition in Asia the year prior at the Aisho/Nanzuka Gallery in Hong Kong. Since then, Calleja has seen immense success and his work has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, including most recently at the K11 Musea in Hong Kong (Little Maurizio, 2021) which explored Calleja’s admiration for Maurizio Cattelan’s celebrated irony and social criticism. Calleja’s paintings now remain in the permanent collects ions of CAC Málaga, Malaga, Granada University Long Museum, Granada, and X Museum, Shanghai, among others.

Calleja’s work exemplifies overly simplified figuration, the expansive passages of a given figure’s hair, t-shirt and over-sized eyes transforming into vibrant, abstract shapes before the viewer. On the surface of the present work, a bleach blond haired boy with enlarged, bright blue eyes gazes out at the viewer, his orange t-shirt marking a striking contrast against the grey ground of the composition. The present painting is titled after the slogan scrawled across the boy’s t-shirt, “Don’t take it all to heart.” Calleja’s cartoonish figures have won him a legion of fans around the world, and the artist himself explains the sense of intrigue and magic that his bold, child-like figures convey: “I think there is something really important in their eyes, and it’s with only two drops, white color, and the shadows. So you get the sensation of real. But the T-shirt, background, and atmosphere are all very stupid and simple. So when your eyes notice the eyes in the painting, the brain feels like the whole image is real. They are very important to people. So your brain is looking at something real but your eyes are looking at something not real, and I think there is some kind of magic in such a moment” (Javier Calleja quoted in: Sasha Bogojev, “Javier Calleja: Finding That Magic Moment,” Juxtapoz, 2019 (online)). Calleja’s brightly coloured compositions amalgamate elements of figuration, abstraction, surrealism, pop, minimalism and anime, and he draws upon the work of his artistic heroes, among them Yoshitomo Nara, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, and Rene Magritte.