Carlo Ricafort’s work attempts to meditatively 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 settled and invested in a small printing business. Self-taught in the graphic arts and offset printing, he pursued his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts in 2000 from San José State University where he studied under Rupert García, an influential political poster maker. He has since exhibited at numerous galleries and cultural spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Manila, Philippines, San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, Bangkok, Thailand, Sete, France and Hamburg, Germany. In the past 3 years, Ricafort has been actively exhibiting and collaborating with the Artist Formerly Known as Friend (AFKAF) based in Manila and the Bay Area.
- “Bridging the Gap” Through Visual Art and Poetry
- “Homegrown: The Filipino Experience” group art show