Octavio del Toro

Octavio del Toro was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1966. A graduate of the Las Palmas School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts, specializing in sculpture, he furthered his training in lost-wax casting at the same school. Most of his painting is grounded in his knowledge of sculpture, and he explores the aesthetic content of the Indigenist movement. Octavio del Toro offers us the opportunity to encounter his own rich world of images. The artist has been developing and refining his unique vision, an easily identifiable universe populated by characteristic, magnificently drawn figures—large, full bodies that almost fill the entire space. He reuses and reinterprets elements of cultural tradition and island life, giving them a new focus and a new lease on life. The figures, with their voluminous appearance, are created using broad areas of acrylic paint applied with a brush on burlap. The bold volumes delineated by Octavio del Toro invite us to become involved in his world of figures and figurations, populated by characters treated with humor without sarcasm, with intense and refined colors.