Arco

Francisco “Chiko” Guimarães (2004) is a visual artist, draughtsman and painter. His practice is rooted in drawing, built over years of studying anatomy, observation and street art, and it expands into painting, letting materiality take over.

His research moves between anatomical distortion, as a picture of the contemporary split between body and mind, and the contrast between the visceral nature of the natural world and urban rigidity. Along the way he begins to see visual repetitions between the human body and nature: veins and roots, trunks and joints, vines and hair, grass and body hair, rocks and skin.

The artist does not set out to invent. He sets out to enlarge and reveal a visuality that comes before and runs through human experience, life and nature, back to before the name.

“Directed spirituality”

Chiko believes in art as his bridge to a plane of matter and time.

He builds his artistic path out of a deep relationship with the streets, a space that has held his attention since childhood through a constant contrast that always troubled him. That early experience, marked by unease, turns over time into critical awareness, guiding a body of work that seeks not only to observe but also to question and to put order into the chaos around him, keeping revolt from turning into the reproduction of hatred.

Photography appears on his path as an essential tool of expression. More than an aesthetic medium, it becomes a language and a stance, allowing the artist to give form to his discomfort with reality. His eye turns to what often goes unnoticed: stories, faces and lives that inhabit the margins and that, in his work, gain visibility and dignity.

His main field of inquiry is interpersonal relationships in the streets and their extensions: how they are built, how they are strained and how they echo in the other. Through these narratives, Guilherme proposes an exercise in sensitivity and awareness, inviting the viewer to face both the uncomfortable urgency and the poetic subtleties of everyday life. His work thus seeks to awaken a critical sense and, in some way, to give back to the streets part of what it received from them.

Luis Bellas says: “The past condemns me to penance, the future casts me into disquiet; in the present I find myself whole, alive.”

His practice grows out of the constant restlessness he feels before reality and out of making things unconsciously. He has no interest in conclusive or pre-planned results. Creating new realities from the limits the materials themselves offer is what satisfies him and pushes him to build new relationships with the present.

He trained in industrial design with a broad interest in graphic and product design, though his specialization is fashion. He went deeper into art direction, costume and product development, practices that feed his restlessness and let him work both on the flat plane and in three dimensions.

His first contact with India ink came in his teens, and since then it has been his main painting material, together with paper and water. In his paintings, the ink stains meet wet paper and form living, progressive and irreversible shapes. The process forces him to stay in the present, in a cyclical ritual of repeated attempts, mistakes and achievements. Faced with something as fleeting and uncontrollable as fire, he tries to untie himself from the human ego, from the attempt to control the uncontrollable, and sets out to create new realities: he navigates, loses himself in the challenge until he drowns, and surfaces with something new.