Bio

Raul Cerrillo (Mexico City B.1977) is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for his large-scale thick energetic paintings. He is focused in finding and creating new paradigms for understanding the mystery of our past mother ancestral cultures with the future of our contemporary technological era.

His work transits from a neo-baroque figuration to a visceral and immediate neo-expressionist abstraction with the consistency of distinctive simple archetypal symbols creating a subjective narrative for the spectator.

He conceives his work with vast layers of paint and meaning as his way of understanding the conformation of individuality and life itself through layers and layers of experience. As a consequence Raul ́s body of work reveals a tremendous amount of evolution in practically all aspects of his craft: style, medium, composition, and subject matter.

In Mexico City, Cerrillo trained at the National School of Arts “La Esmeralda”.

He has had individual shows in mayor cities of Mexico as well as in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, London and recently in Miami at Vice Contemporary Gallery. His work has been part of collective exhibitions in museums in Mexico as well as exhibitions in Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Venice, and London. He has been awarded twice with National Fund for the Arts as well as honorable mentions and state awards. In 2018 he received the Mexican National Award for Painting “Alfredo Zalce” in Mexico.

Statement

My artistic growth in art has always been linked with my fascination of the technology of the body and how man has created and developed tools for his evolutionary potential, as well as with the search and experimentation of alternative healing processes for the body, mind and soul.

My research allowed me to access shamanic rituals, medicinal plants and studies of mother cultures (Olmec, Mayan & Aztec) that helped me rethink my belief system and my life’s purpose. Painting, sculpture and multidisciplinary mediums have been means to represent my constant themes of exploration and internalization. All these issues and concerns that have accompanied me have helped my metamorphic process and have deepened the relationship with my artistic production.

The way I approach painting is like a monk that goes daily to the temple to meditate, every day I paint a stimulus or an idea, so information on the canvas just keeps accumulating, giving the canvas/object more information/energy, generating magnetism. The same way humans accumulate new perceptions, or as a Toltec maxim: “the purpose in life is to cultivate our perception”.

This palimpsest of overlapping or daily algorithms create images by themselves, sometimes revealing to me the subjects to paint or answers to questions that I have not yet formulated.

– Raúl Cerrillo