Francisco Sepulveda
From each of his pieces emerges a story, a fairy tale, a myth. Francisco Sepulveda’s creative process involves letting his intuition guide him, allowing subjects to take shape on their own and themes to come to life without any pre-conceived notions. The interpretation is what follows. Women are very much present, always in connection to natural elements, plants, animals. They are an integral part of the nature represented, blending into the trees, becoming horses or snakes. They express the unity between humans and nature, in a celebration of the symbiosis and a metaphor of our dependence on the earth’s resources.
There is nothing militant about this, however, nor any realism in work that is constructed much like a symbolist painting, using emotion as a path toward meaning. Although the composition refrains from marking out a particular perspective, the line of the horizon is a constant. It separates the sky from the earth, the sky from the water, the water from the earth. It functions as an anchor, a point of stability in this dreamlike landscape. The brightly coloured images evoke the artist’s flamboyant Latin-American origins, which have been enriched by the different cultures Sepulveda has encountered through his many travels: already focused on becoming a painter, he travelled to Easter Island when he was just 15 years old. Then, after finishing school, to Cuba, Mexico and Robinson Crusoe Island. He has travelled widely in Europe, the United States, and Africa, especially in Mozambique where he lived for five years.
Francisco Sepulveda studied drawing, painting, and printing at the School of Fine Arts in Santiago, after which he explored experimental printmaking techniques in Wilfredo Lam’s workshop. He trained in lithography in South Africa and then in Lausanne with Raynald Métraux. His work has been shown regularly in France, Switzerland, Germany, the United States and Latin America. He is internationally recognized, and his work is featured in numerous public collections in New York, Zurich, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Lyon, and Brussels.
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