My experience as an Artist started pretty much as soon as I could grab a pencil in my hands. Walking came later as the need to escape after graffitting the walls at home. I was mainly inspired by my grandfather, French handyman that could build anything with timber and that portrayed life with his camera and his brushes. For me drawing became my instrument to portrait the world around.
In 1990 and 1991 I followed a painting course with Tatai at the Painting Academy of D’abadi in Santiago de Chile. In the same years I would do my first collective exhibitions, and I would have the first cash out of selling my art: The Hermitage, a copy of a famous painting that was sold for a very modest amount to, at the time, Ambassador of Switzerland in Chile.
From 1993 to 1999 I coursed the Architectural School at the University of Chile. The demand of spatial creativity took over the two dimensional freestyle I have had until then. During those years new perspectives brought a new style. Paintings like Chronos, Canibalismo en R, El Hombre que Corre and Ulysses are some of the outcomes of oil on canvas. At the same time great friends brought new ideas, and the production of cartoons became a hobby while mocking on teachers and colleagues- especially in morning classes- and kept everyone a bit more awake.
I became even more busy as a professional architect, and after a few years of trying to build my own practice I decided finally to move to Europe. This became another breakpoint when I landed and saw the ‘New Old World’ . Since 2004, I have been living and working in cities such as Rotterdam, Cologne, Le Havre, Paris, London and Copenhagen. I have exhibited my drawings in Paris at Gallery Les Jemmapes and Berlin, Kreuzberg at the Zeitzone Gallerie,The Fox in Stoke Newington, London, VoresKaffeBar in Copenhagen, and I have also published drawings in some magazines.
My drawings and cartoons intend to describe in a figurative and clear way political affairs, irrelevant situations, spatial fantasies and states of mind. I have portrayed some of the (in)famous characters of the current scene in the world, and from a heavenly conceived democracy into aliens realizing that evolution is adapting to human good manners. The last thing that dies would not be hope but the sense of humor. Salud!
C. Kaco Manns