Chico Coelho – Midwest vs West Art Exhibition

Artist Portfolio Magazine 

Chico Coelho – San Francisco, CA

Born in Americana and raised in Piracicaba, Brasil, Coelho currently lives in San Francisco, California, US, where he creates modern abstract art. Coelho went to school in São Paulo, where he took studies on Architecture and Urban Development. At that time, Coelho also worked as an artist, publicity photographer, educational textbook illustrator, music composer, singer, and songwriter (Coelho has recorded two albums of his own compositions). Later, he lived for many years in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, where he owned an art gallery and worked with a diverse artwork collection.

Among artists from 22 countries, in 1998, Coelho was one of the twenty Brazilian artists to participate in the celebratory exhibition of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Paris, France, held at Grande Arche/La Defense, Figuration Critique. The same show opened the Centro Cultural de Sintra (Cultural Center of Sintra) in Portugal, and two publications of the exhibition were later released in Paris and Sintra. Coelho’s exhibition showed IMPRESSOES DO APOCALYPSE (Impressions of the Apocalypse), an artwork collection whose nature is essentially social and depicts the panhandlers and the homeless in the city of São Paulo. In its figurative style, Coelho used various techniques and recycled materials as an alternative to canvases.

In 2005, Coelho was selected to be one of the artists to work for ATELIER AMARELO (Yellow Art Studio), a project sponsored by the Secretaria de Estado da Cultura de São Paulo (Sao Paulo Cultural…). His work, NA RUA (In the streets), portrays the people living in Cracolandia (the land of the crack) in São Paulo who were for the most part homeless crack addicts.

Also in 2005, Coelho created Vaca Bandida (Bad Cow), which was selected for the CowParade/São Paulo, an international public art event that exhibits life-sized cows and have been staged in over 50 countries worldwide since 1999.

As an eclectic artist, Chico Coelho also works with the modern abstract art in its colors and their behaviors, blending effects and light. His many years o creation and experimentation with a wide range of techniques have resulted in the development of his own technique, The Dissolution of Fractals. Through this technique, the paint hits the canvas randomly to create a three-dimensional effect onto the canvas. This effect is the result of the combination and placement of colors and it can be clearly obtained through a pair of chromadepth 3D lenses although it is naturally achieved under a constant and relaxed observation.

Coelho’s artistic uneasiness has motivated him to further research and experiment in search of new themes and techniques so that he continues to create artwork that is pulsating and diversified.