Ricafort’s work attempts to explore and parallel the conundrums and travails of human existence by blurring representation with abstraction. He excavates history, music, philosophy and current events as an impetus to make free-associative commentaries through painting, drawing and printmaking. Thus, his artistic process can gain the appearance of being chaotic, eclectic, open-ended, and even “hacked” from multiple sources. It is in the arbitrariness where Ricafort looks to decipher cryptic codes stating, “picture-making is one way to interweave all these contexts allowing me to explore and play with both content and form."
Born in a taxi on Yoyogi Street in Tokyo, Japan, John Yoyogi Fortes is a Filipino-American painter based in Sacramento. His paintings are often large scale explorations of self that lean towards a whimsical, dark and obscure world.
Quintana's works references a pre-post-anti-pro revolutionary gumbo/ajiaco potpourri of image making that navigates between narratives and abstractions.
Whimsical in style, Quintana embraces ambiguity and contradictions. His oeuvre is infused with irony and satire that often speaks of current events ideological conundrums, and lost idealism.