Rafael Sottolichio lives and works in Montreal. He holds a master’s degree in visual and media arts as well as a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Born in Santiago, Chile, he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of three, carrying with him the legacy of a country marked by Cold War tensions, military dictatorship, and struggles over international economic interests. This personal history, shaped by power dynamics and industrial upheavals, serves as an essential backdrop to his artistic practice.
In his pictorial work, Sottolichio creates ruptures and contrasts between figurative and abstract zones. His hybrid artistic proposals revolve around narrative constructions through which he explores social themes such as identity, the relationship between individuals and public space, immigration-related issues, and the notion of territory.
Drawing from photographs, he composes enigmatic landscapes and staged human figures, sometimes rendered realistically, sometimes suggested through silhouettes. These characters and objects inhabit environments imbued with strangeness and ambiguity.
Through a process of juxtaposition and superposition of abstraction, figuration, and popular imagery, he examines the multiple expressive possibilities of painting. In this construction of a pictorial language where technique influences the reading of meaning, narrativity modulates the tensions that emerge between the elements of the image, either amplifying or softening them depending on the composition.
