Sebastian Riffo-Montenegro

Sebastian Riffo-Montenegro is a visual artist born in Chile. He has a degree in Design and works as an Art Director in the area of marketing and advertising. Along with this activity, he maintains a solid production of works of art that criticize consumer society and the creation of social beliefs. Disposable artificial products that envelop and define the behavior of man—very worked images that we see in different media but that have a programmed expiration. By passing these images to a pictorial work, they lose their expiration and become timeless reflections of consumption.


Artist Statement

In his works, he shows faceless figures in trench coats maneuvering across deconstructed backgrounds of color. He works with a selective palette and controlled lighting to create veils of lucid colors and mysterious shapes. In his work, absence is a common idea.

He presents an explicit critique of social customs and the creation of social beliefs such as religion, fashion, consumerism, the state, borders, the digitization of life, and the excessive desire for success and power. Beliefs that surround us, cover us, submerge us, and eventually deform our capacity and right to free will.

Sebastian Riffo-Montenegro manages to both veil and reveal the image, frankly referencing socio-cultural icons that historically have molded our unconscious discourse. Through these pictorial allegories, the work provokes the necessity to unveil the imagery, to discern and comprehend a new significance, reconsidering and awakening the tacit human condition of free will.


http://riffomontenegro.com/