Rafael Feo
Madrid 1946 - Madrid 2006

Spanish painter and writer Rafael Feo has been described as an outsider due to his drug addiction and strongly anti-establishment attitude. He enrolled on a degree in Philosophy and Letters but never completed it. Over the course of his life he had many different jobs. On the artistic side, his work as a poet stands out, with his books Harpócrates y Hebe, published in 1972, and De pendencia from 1987. He also worked on documentaries for the Spanish cinema newsreel NO-DO. Much of his output as a painter dates from the second half of the 1980s.

His works have been called visual poetry, and take a line that runs the gamut from poetic lyric writing to graffiti art with a more punk aesthetic, including frequent use of collage. Gestural forms and the use of language often overlap to form written palimpsests with an air of horror vacui, where style becomes a weapon for bludgeoning viewers into reflecting, with heavy doses of irony, on reality and multiple aspects of modern art. All this is done with an expressive use of colour in such outstanding works as Bravo (1985), Beirut (1985) and The Embrance [sic] (1987), which were selected for the exhibition of current Spanish art in Spain's pavilion at the World Expo 1988 in Brisbane, Australia. This was one of the main recognitions of his work.

The only exhibitions of his works were solo shows at the La Cúpula Gallery in Madrid (1988) and the Columela Gallery, also in Madrid (1988 and 1991).

Roberto Díaz