Carlos Aquilino

Carlos Aquilino is a self-taught visual artist based in Madrid, Spain. As a self taught artist, he has been practicing painting, drawing, and sculpting from a young age. Carlos is deeply interested in creating a humanized world in his art that brings the viewer closer to their surroundings. While his most recent work, ‘The Nature Series,’ is a series of oil paintings, he creates his art pieces on many different platforms. In Aquilino’s paintings, he uses oil on both canvas and cardboard, and they often find focus in the world around him. Aquilino also uses found material and objects to help form his sculptures. His drawings are made with markers and ink on paper without any initial sketch. Aquilino hopes to articulate his thoughts and feelings across the paper, with no beginning or end.

“My works emerge from emotion, in a spontaneous and intuitive way. My creation is always direct, I do not prepare sketches in advance. I create my works on many different platforms. In my Nature Series, I explore natural forms, pinpointing plants and flowers and allowing them to swell to an unnatural size. Figures are also a presence in these scenes. They are tiny, caught in waves of grass, captured in wandering stems, or impossibly climbing and clinging to the giant flowers. They are figures faceless, diluted of color, creatures of the earth succumbing to the overwhelming power of its nature.”

Aquilino finds inspiration in the cross-cultural experiences that have taken him to the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the Creative Arts Center of Virginia, the New Mexico desert at the Helen Wurlitzer Foundation, to Izvorul Mures in the Romanian Carpathians, and a residence as an international artist at Point B Worklodge in Brooklyn, NY. He finds these experiences to be an essential part of who he has become as an artist. Aquilino’s work has been exhibited in New York, Madrid, Barcelona, Budapest, Athens, Firenze, London, Philadelphia, and California.