Mindscape Manifesto | Caio Locke

A background in etching influenced the development of my detailed style whilst childhood travels between London and Rio, and a trip to the temples of Angkor, triggered much of the work that followed. Art has always been central to my life but it was only later, when I had already embarked on a legal career, that I knew for certain that painting was my calling. 

 Working in acrylics or oils, the process takes me to a threshold between free-flowing intuition on the one hand and communicable rationality on the other.  Bridging this divide by optical layering and spatial illusion, abstraction and realism, allows for the creation of multi-dimensional urban landscapes.  Manmade structures, distinctive from natural forms, at times visibly strive to emulate them, as though rounding a circle to our beginnings.The choice of collective habitat as subject matter allows for personal and universal perspectives to unite in a Hegelian synthesis of subjective and objective. The intervening painting process is a meditation with the merging of the spiritual and intellectual, and the results are democratic in their equality of recognition to form and concept. Avoiding depiction of the human condition in the context of suffering, tragicomedy or dysfunction, the paintings invite the mind of the viewer into alternative propositions. If the word ‘utopia’, upon its translation of ‘no place’, simply masks a false optimism, what is the endgame of civilisation? The paintings answer this question by conjuring cities as awakened, dream-like nuclei where projections of a post-fragmentary world might be realised.My paintings are exhibited and collected internationally. Commissions include sculpture designs, music covers and fashion designs. My 3D designs received public attention through participation in major public art projects including London Elephant Parade (2010), Edinburgh Jungle City (2011), Fabergé Big Egg Hunt (2012), Stand Tall, Colchester (2013), the Chakravarty Cup and the BFG Spielberg Dream Jar project (2016).Caio Locke