Camilo Restrepo's artistic journey is one of rupture and reinvention, a path marked by destruction and reconstruction, both within himself and his work. Born in Medellín, Colombia, Restrepo’s early years were spent in the analytical precision of mechanical engineering, yet it was a backpacking trip through South America that revealed his true calling. Photography became the gateway, but academia led him deeper into the arts. It was his time at CalArts, however, that shattered and reassembled him, forging an artist unshackled from convention and perfectionism.

CalArts was less an education and more an initiation. Thrust into crisis and self-reflection, he was unmoored from certainty and ultimately unearthed a practice built on raw instinct and material resistance. In his studio, Restrepo confronted his anxieties, scrawling across walls, collecting debris, and embracing the grotesque. From this chaos, his passion for drawing emerged, not as mastery but as survival. He began expanding his compositions organically until they sprawled like tangled neural pathways, a subconscious mapping of trauma and catharsis. His materials ranged from anti-fraud pens, crude crayons, and even images scavenged from Google. 

Rooted in the turbulence of Colombia’s narco history and the globalized flood of digital imagery, Restrepo’s work echoes the raw immediacy of outsider artists. With his self-taught and intuitively driven style, he rejects refinement, subverting the authority of the polished mark. His figures exist in a state of monstrous imperfection, uncanny and uncontained. In its most recent form, his practice is devoted to the fusion of the real and the imagined, forcing us to face realities as his original forms meld with images of popular culture and the familiarity found in his inclusion of newspaper photographs. The absurd finds its place in our reality. 

Between each crumbled sheet, the vulnerability of the fractured pages taped back together, and the layers of ink, it was these notions that became reinforced through his participation in the residency program. Embracing notions of collaboration and relationship-building, the cathartic nature of his practice has been reinforced. While tackling such weighted and relevant issues, he has unearthed new, relaxed, and conceptual approaches that allow his practice of destruction, excavation, and repairing to flow more seamlessly into dialogue with other contemporary artists. His is a practice of disorder as language. Through it, he has exorcised the weight of personal and collective history, forging a path where art is not a performance of control but a space of radical surrender.