"London Callin" Painting

I was born in Jamaica in 1960. I'm a Mixed Media Artist, living and working between central London and Italy. Giles Bernard - "Chico's work exposes the endless, unlimited sides to a city; it's beauty and it's ugliness, it's limitations and also it's possibilities, the way people move within a city and the way that a city moves people. In the Bling City series, Chico puts to work the materials that the city offers up to him- found materials, sweet wrappers, corrugated cardboard, nails, pieces of wood, glass and uses them to focus back on the city itself. At first, the pictures suggest that everything that glitters could be gold. Chico doesn't shy from showing a city at it's most beautiful, but he also forces us to look harder, stripping back the layers, and revealing the grain, textures and patterns that surround us. Elsewhere in the collection, his work in wood builds on the theme-burnt, scraped, cut, scarred and scratched, the material itself leads the artist, giving depth and feeling into the images. All the pieces reflect nature at work in an urban environment and the city's continual shifts and changes as new layers are heaped upon old. But they also remind us what never changes, as continual wear and tear, a kind of urban erosion, reveals sections of the past again. It is a fascinating collection that explores peoples complex relationships with the city. A relationship as fickle and unpredictable as we will have in our lives."