Raúl Cerrillo (b. Mexico City, 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for his large-scale, dense, energetic paintings. He is focused on finding and creating new paradigms for understanding the mystery of our past ancestral mother cultures alongside 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 formation 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.

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.

During my stay at the MOMENTUM-LAGOS residency, I will continue creating and depicting character gods and prophets, always thinking and being aware that the art activity is a super power. With installations, objects and paintings I intend to create a ludic environment that relates childhood, consciousness and nature.

One of my recurrent subjects in painting is about remembering our own interior child that we usually forget and anesthetize as we become adults.
The idea I feel about children is that they are little giant gods that can easily gather objects and things together that would make no sense in the adult world and transform and manipulate its physicality. Mostly when I am thinking in art I transform into a child. Lately I’ve also been thinking about the idea of consciousness (living beings that have the ability to suffer or feel happiness) vs. Intelligence (AI, that has the ability to make its own decisions), and how making art today is even more relevant and necessary.