In contrast to Hyperrealism,
"Symbiosism" promotes
creating pictorial works from photographs.
A journey from "Experience towards Consciousness"
Chicote CFC / 2012
CHICOTE CFC
ARTIST
STATEMENT
Born on December 20, 1963, Chicote CFC showed a strong inclination toward artistic creation from an early age. Largely self-taught in his formative years, his initial approach to art emerged through the observation and reinterpretation of both classical masters and the surrealist and abstract avant-garde. In 1984, seeking to refine his practice and expand his expressive resources, he enrolled at the Centro de Estudios Académicos de Arte – Artium in Madrid. His early works, distinctly classical in nature, gradually evolved toward experimentation with materials, mixed techniques, and more contemporary visual languages. During this period, his interest in image-making expanded into photography, a discipline he incorporated through his travels and progressively integrated into the core of his creative process. From that point onward, his work has been structured around a continuous dialogue between the pictorial and the photographic, consolidating a distinctive visual perspective. Alongside his artistic practice, he contributed as an art critic and writer to various print media, while also pursuing studies in the scientific field. This dual path fostered a growing interest in technology and innovation—elements that would become central to his work. With the emergence of digital tools, he broadened his scope into graphic design and digital image-making, incorporating new processes and visual languages. With more than forty-five years of experience, his career spans painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, digital creation, and interior design, forming a diverse yet coherent body of work driven by a continuous pursuit of integration between art and technology. Driven by a deep cultural and human curiosity, he has traveled to more than eighty countries, building an extensive personal visual archive that serves as a fundamental source for his work. In 2012, he formulated “Symbiosism” or “Symbiotic Art,” a movement that proposes a conceptual inversion of hyperrealism and explores the fusion of photography and painting, establishing a new relationship between image, perception, and thought. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Mexico City, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Miami, Vienna, Taiwan, Venice, and Hamburg. His work stands at the intersection of art, technology, and contemporary thought, consolidating a unique language that redefines the boundaries between photography and painting.
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OPTICS OF THE
WORK
"Dreams are the playground of the intelligence,
creativity his only moment of freedom and independence"
Chicote CFC / 2012
The work of Chicote CFC is built upon a constant tension between resistance and visual excess, moving away from aesthetic complacency and formal neutrality. In this sense, his practice distances itself from monochrome simplification and the structural reduction of minimalism, unfolding instead a dense visual energy of strong expressive intensity. His visual language is shaped through a complex form of execution in which texture, colour, and light operate as active construction elements. The richness of chromatic nuance, controlled reflections, and subtle transparencies form a visual system that echoes pictorial processes such as glazing, reinterpreted through a contemporary logic. These visual structures do not aim for a literal correspondence with represented reality, but instead function as open metaphors in which the expressive and the conceptual coexist in balance. At times, they approach an essential form of expressionism, where form becomes a vehicle for emotional tension and visual thought. Beyond its formal dimension, the work is situated within the field of critical observation of contemporary human behaviour. It operates as a device for reflection on the social, cultural, and emotional structures that define the present era. Rather than pursuing an idealised representation of the human being, it confronts its contradictions directly. His images expose fundamental tensions of contemporary society: ethical fragility, dependence on external recognition, the trivialisation of others’ suffering, and the normalisation of dynamics rooted in egoism, envy, or insecurity. There is no explicit moral judgement, but rather a process of exposure. Underlying the work is a reflection on the artificial rhythm that structures contemporary life: a permanent state of acceleration that has displaced pause, introspection, and analytical depth. This constant state of speed generates a central paradox: the more connected society becomes, the further it drifts from what is essential. The work does not seek to illustrate or resolve these conflicts, but to make them visible. It operates as a space of tension in which the viewer is confronted with what is usually diluted within the visual routine of contemporary life. Rather than offering answers, it proposes a form of confrontation with the present: an invitation to observe, with critical distance, that which defines—and at the same time distorts—the contemporary human condition.
CREDENTIALS
The work of "Chicote CFC" has been acquired or requested in a heterogeneous manner by very diverse spaces, centers, entities and collections, both public and private. In an exercise of maximum respect and due to the express wish of some of its owners to maintain anonymity and confidentiality, no reference is made to them in this section.
“The Symbiosism does not seek to explain the image, but to bring about its revelation.
The work is not meant to be decoded or understood — it is felt and experienced.
Within it, the emotional and the conceptual intertwine until their boundaries dissolve,
transforming the image into a living pulse — intimate and deeply human.”
