CHICOTE CFC

The creative activity of Chicote CFC begins practically at the same time as his conscious relationship with the world. From a very young age, he finds in drawing a natural way of observing and understanding everything that surrounds him. Those first exercises, carried out in an essentially self-taught manner, progressively gave way to painting and the learning of different techniques, while he began to familiarize himself with the materials and procedures specific to the visual arts. During adolescence, he creates his first oil paintings, drawings, ink works, and sculptures, participates in competitions, and also begins to develop graphic and mural works. In 1984, he enters the Centro de Estudios Académicos de Arte – Artium in Madrid, where he expands his artistic training and consolidates knowledge that had already been developing for years. Parallel to his artistic training, he begins very early to work in activities related to applied creation. He starts as a sign painter and draftsman and later develops decoration, muralism, window dressing, and illustration works, executing interventions for commercial establishments, bars, restaurants, and other spaces. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he progressively expands his activity into the graphic arts and, after completing complementary training in management, marketing, accounting, and administration, begins a period of increasing dedication to graphic design and image production. What had initially been a complementary activity would end up becoming an important part of his productive life. The incorporation of computing and new technologies would decisively modify his working procedures. As digital tools become more accessible, Chicote CFC begins to specialize in graphic design, image processing, digital production, and corporate image, developing an extensive activity for companies and individuals over decades. His work would cover very diverse areas, from graphic and advertising creation to photography, painting, sculpture, interior design, window dressing, and other forms of visual intervention. According to biographical documentation, this stage amasses more than 45 years of accumulated experience in different disciplines and more than 25,000 illustration, graphic, and corporate production projects. Photography appears meanwhile as another of the major lines of his activity. Travel, initially linked to a personal curiosity to experience other places and cultures, ends up also becoming a form of work and visual research. For years, he travels through numerous countries and gathers a vast visual archive of his own, with plastic and documentary records from more than eighty countries across five continents. That accumulation of photographs would not remain a simple travel archive: over time, it would become one of the fundamental raw materials for his subsequent artistic production. During the following years, a progressive convergence occurs between photography, painting, and technology. In 2012, he begins to deliberately experiment with the combination of photographs and digital pictorial resources. The photographic image then ceases to be solely a document to become matter susceptible to transformation. Through successive processes of manipulation, intervention, and visual construction, he begins to develop a way of working that would end up acquiring its own identity. From this experience emerges 'Symbiosism or Symbiotic Art,' conceived as an inversion of the traditional relationship between painting and photography: it is not about painting imitating photography, but about bringing photography toward qualities inherent to painting. From that moment on, artistic production acquires a much more systematic dimension. After several years of technical experimentation and searching for procedures, he begins to continuously produce works in Symbiosism and to present his work in different spaces, competitions, fairs, and national and international exhibitions. Between 2015 and 2020, he develops an especially intense part of this production, while participating in numerous calls and exhibitions in Europe, America, and other international fields. In 2017, he publicly presents Symbiosism in a solo exhibition at the Centro Municipal de las Artes Buero Vallejo in Alcorcón and subsequently also holds a solo exhibition at the Museo de la Ciudad in Móstoles. This same period leads to the publication of his first books dedicated to the movement and the reflection that sustains it. Production is not limited from then on to the creation of images. In parallel, he begins to build a documentary structure around the work: cataloging, photographic archive, publications, books, general catalogs, and texts aimed at explaining the procedures, fundamentals, and concepts that accompany Symbiosism. The work itself thus becomes part of a broader research process in which creation, documentation, and reflection develop simultaneously. After fifteen years of practical development, philosophical reflection, and technical evolution, the movement subsequently reaches a more defined doctrinal formulation, gathered in its Foundational Corpus and in the Manifesto of Symbiotic Art. During this stage, the volume of production and documentation of the work continues to increase. Artistic activity comes to coexist with an increasingly intense effort of cataloging and organizing the archive, forming a production that is currently distributed in successive general catalogs. The tenth volume, corresponding to 2025-2026, collects 456 works and reflects a stage in which the work is progressively oriented toward more reflective and symbolic positions, shifting the initial emphasis of some works toward a deeper investigation into contemporary consciousness. In 2023, a decisive change occurs in his dedication. Following the passing of his mother—an event that for years had conditioned his personal and professional decisions—he dissolves the companies and commercial activities he had maintained and decides to fully dedicate his time to artistic creation. Since then, production ceases to develop in parallel with other occupations and becomes the center of his activity. This change also marks a new stage of concentration on the work, research, writing, and the theoretical construction of Symbiosism. At present, his productive activity thus develops on several levels that no longer appear separated. The creation of artwork, photography, archiving, cataloging, writing, research on perception, and the elaboration of the fundamentals of Symbiotic Art are part of the same creative process. The journey that began with drawing and traditional painting, continued through graphics, photography, and digital technology, and ended up leading to Symbiosism does not constitute, in this sense, a succession of independent activities, but rather the progressive accumulation of resources with which Chicote CFC has built his current artistic language.