About
The Vision of Pako Campo
Pako Campo is a Spanish multidisciplinary artist, curator, and creative director from Cenicero, La Rioja, whose practice spans painting, digital art, sculpture, immersive installation, and hybrid media.
Artistic Practice
Across these forms, one idea remains central to his work: the city as narrative. Campo is especially known for transforming rooftops, skylines, towers, and dense urban horizons into luminous, high-energy compositions in which realism and abstraction coexist. His paintings and digital works often engage broader social and humanitarian themes through color, architecture, motion, and atmosphere, constructing visual worlds that are at once seductive, restless, and emotionally charged.
He began painting at the age of eight, initially under the guidance of the hyperrealist painter Rafael Jiménez, and took part in his first exhibition at nine. Although he later complemented his self-directed practice with training linked to the University of Salamanca, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Campo has consistently described himself as largely self-taught, having developed much of his technical range through independent practice across multiple disciplines. This combination of early artistic formation and self-directed experimentation helps explain the dual nature of his language: carefully structured yet instinctive, painterly yet highly designed. A background in graphic design also informs the compositional clarity of his work, where perspective, rhythm, and visual impact are never accidental.
From the outset, Campo’s work has been closely tied to ideas of diversity, transformation, and perception. His cityscapes frequently begin with real places—often large, saturated, overbuilt urban environments—and are then reimagined through a chromatic language of heightened contrast and expressive distortion. Color in his work is not merely decorative; it acts as a symbolic force, often opposing greyness, uniformity, and the flattening effects of contemporary urban life. Over time, this visual approach has evolved into what he has described as a way of “defying the perspective”: using vanishing points, impossible light, and manipulated viewpoints as metaphors for movement, identity, and self-discovery.
International Career
Campo’s international career accelerated in 2014, when he began working in Los Angeles on projects linked to film art departments, visual communication, and multidisciplinary creative work, while also engaging with art galleries across the city. This period expanded both his professional network and the scope of his practice, allowing him to move more fluidly between fine art, applied visual culture, and cross-media experimentation. It also marked the beginning of a more international phase in which painting, photography, digital image-making, and exhibition design increasingly fed into one another.
A major turning point in Campo’s trajectory came through his repeated presence in New York, where he has exhibited five times. In 2017, he participated in Artexpo New York, where his painting Hong Drone I entered the collection of Queensborough Community College Museum in New York. In 2018, he returned to Artexpo as the only independent Spanish artist in the main show, presenting the large-scale work #NovaY, which was highlighted by critics as one of the standout works of the fair. That same year, he also gained further visibility in the city through participation in the group show “Visions” at Saphira & Ventura Gallery on Fifth Avenue. In 2019, he returned to Artexpo and received the fair’s Award of Excellence among hundreds of exhibitors. His New York trajectory later extended to Grimandi Gallery, where he exhibited again in late 2021, adding another Manhattan venue to this international chapter of his career.
Art doesn’t follow the water stream, but fights against it
Campo also received the Premio a las Artes 2017 from the Centro Riojano de Madrid and the International Art Prize Raffaello in Bologna (Italy). In 2018, he was included in Art Market Magazine’s Gold List, and in 2019 he was featured by Art Tour Magazine among its artists of the year. That same year, he was selected for the XII Florence Biennale as the only Spanish painter in the official selection. His international exhibition record also includes Pandemia y Resiliencia at Patio Bullrich in Buenos Aires (Argentina), where he received an award from Fundación Rossi.
In Spain, Campo has maintained a continuous exhibition presence while expanding his reputation beyond the regional circuit. His work has been shown at the Ateneo de Madrid, the Logroño Art Fair, several exhibitions at Santana Art Gallery in Madrid, the Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona, and a wide range of galleries and collective exhibitions. He has also taken part in every edition of the Salón de Otoño de Pintura y Escultura de La Rioja since 2017, and in every edition of Mazacote de Barro in Alberite since 2022. Taken together, these recurring appearances reflect a career that has remained locally rooted while simultaneously international in reach.
A decisive development in Campo’s practice has been the growing expansion of his work into digital and post-digital languages. He has been working seriously in digital art since 2015, developing a body of work that extends his visual language beyond painting while maintaining the same attention to composition, atmosphere, and conceptual intent.
Digital Art, NFTs & Expanded Media
In 2020, he began working in the field of NFTs and cryptoart, positioning himself among the early Spanish artists to take blockchain-based art seriously as a creative medium rather than a passing trend. His activity in this area has included the creation of several NFT collections, among them CyberMartians, a collection made up of 10,000 unique pieces, as well as Shine in/the Dark, HUMAN·NO, MART"Z, Marte Genesis Rocks, etc. He also developed The MARTE Project and its associated MARTE token, expanding his practice into a broader blockchain-based ecosystem that connects artistic creation, digital identity, and community-building. In parallel, he has taken part in collaborative projects such as Sail the Stars, alongside some of the most widely recognized NFT creators on the international scene. His creations can be found on Rarible or OpenSea.
From 2021 onward, he also began exploring augmented reality in a distinctive and highly original way, using it not as a gimmick but as an expressive layer that expands the artwork beyond its physical limits. In these works, Campo combines static images created through photographic sessions that sometimes incorporate body painting, creative lighting, and other performative or staged elements with video art in the form of animations and original musical compositions created as part of the work. Through this fusion of image, movement, and sound, the work unfolds as an immersive experience, enveloping the viewer in its atmosphere and deepening the emotional and conceptual resonance of the piece. Rather than treating digital art, cryptoart, and augmented reality as separate from his studio practice, Campo has folded them into a wider investigation of authorship, perception, virtual presence, and the relationship between art, technology, and community.
Pako Campo artHOUSE and Curatorial Work
That evolution became especially visible through Pako Campo artHOUSE in Cenicero, founded by the artist in 2015 as a studio and creative lab devoted to artistic production, experimentation, and cross-disciplinary work. In 2023, the project expanded with the opening of its gallery space, inaugurated with HUMAN·NO, an exhibition centered on the intersection of humanity and technology. The show brought together augmented reality, 3D-printed sculpture, digital works, NFTs, and a parallel presentation in the metaverse of Decentraland, making clear that Campo’s practice had expanded from the painted canvas into immersive and networked environments. Through artHOUSE, he also works as a curator and project developer, extending his activity beyond authorship into cultural production and artistic coordination.
Hotel Actual represents another key dimension of Campo’s recent work, extending his practice into curatorial direction, spatial storytelling, and immersive cultural production. Conceived as an author-driven event, it reflects a strong curatorial identity shaped by artistic vision, conceptual coherence, and a distinctive experiential approach. Developed within the framework of Festival Actual in La Rioja, the project transforms hotel rooms into site-specific artistic environments that bring together contemporary art, installation, design, technology, and public experience. Within this context, Campo has played a central role not only as an artist, but also as curator, coordinator, and conceptual lead. His involvement has included defining the curatorial vision of the project, selecting artists, shaping the identity and narrative of the rooms, coordinating production processes, supporting the development of participating artists’ proposals, and helping articulate the event as a coherent platform where emerging and established creators meet through experimentation, dialogue, and innovation.
Across these different phases, Campo’s work has remained unmistakably his own: bold in color, urban in structure, and increasingly hybrid in method. His practice spans acrylic painting, digital image construction, conceptual portraiture, moving image, augmented layers, metaverse exhibitions, and sculptural production through both filament and resin 3D printing. His work is held in private collections across Europe, the United States, Canada, Singapore, and other countries, and the inclusion of Hong Drone I in the collection of Queensborough Community College remains one of the clearest institutional markers of that international reach.
Today, Pako Campo stands as a contemporary artist whose career connects several worlds at once: the studio and the screen, painting and code, local cultural identity and global circulation. Whether working with canvas, light, urban imagery, augmented reality, sculpture, or blockchain-based formats, he approaches art as an experiential field—something that should not simply be looked at, but entered, crossed, and felt. His trajectory reflects a sustained commitment to experimentation, visual intensity, and the creation of new spaces where contemporary art can remain both disruptive and emotionally direct.
