Carlo Ricafort

CARLO RICAFORT

(Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines) 

Ricafort’s work attempts to explore and parallel the conundrums and travails of human existence by blurring representation with abstraction.  He excavates history, music, philosophy and current events as an impetus to make free-associative commentaries through painting, drawing and printmaking.  Thus, his artistic process can gain the appearance of being chaotic, eclectic, open-ended, and even “hacked” from multiple sources. It is in the arbitrariness where Ricafort looks to decipher cryptic codes stating, “picture-making is one way to interweave all these contexts allowing me to explore and play with both content and form."

Ricafort immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985 where his family invested in a printing business.  Self-taught in the graphic arts and offset printing, he pursued his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts from San José State University in 2000.  He has since exhibited at museums, numerous galleries and cultural spaces in San Francisco (US), Los Angeles (US), New York (US), San Cristóbal de las Casas (MX), Bangkok (TH), Sète (FR), Hamburg (DE), Manila (PH) and participated in the collateral exhibitions of the XII Havana Biennial (CU).  He currently works out of San Francisco and is co-founder of the artist-run gallery, Random Parts in Oakland, California.