Bico’s art doesn’t play it safe

Toni Bico is not interested in playing it safe.

He is adding the finishing touches to his upcoming exhibition, Metamorphosis.

It’s a blunt yet immensely beautiful collection of social commentary. It’s a bit uncomfortable, which it should be, and not a collection of pyjama works designed to match living room wallpaper.

Instead, it is a visual commentary on what he called ‘the speed of now,’ where birds, torn canvas and installations come together to contemplate war, greed and capitalism, and a world in constant momentum.  

“It started with the idea that we are living through a moment of massive change,” Bico said. “Everything, political, financial, environmental, feels like it is collapsing and rebuilding at the same time. So, the idea for the show began with deconstruction. Literally.”

He meant it. In one of the works in Metamorphosis, he tore apart earlier paintings and stitched them into something new.

The pieces, he shared, are “canvas collages” packed with meaning and emotional residue.

Metaphorical birds

Birds are his metaphor. And there are a lot of them.  

“They are not just birds,” he said. “They are analogies. For us, for migration, for consumerism, for the planet. One installation has ninety-nine birds displayed like goods in a market. It touches on how everything, even life itself, is for sale.”

A suitcase filled with painted birds speaks to exile, departure, and the kind of movement not often brought up in polite conversation.

“It is not about birds flying south. It is about people. About often reluctant migration,” he said.

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Despite the larger-than-life feel of the show, Bico does not chase spectacle. But it’s provocative.

“If you are curious, you will get it,” he said. “If not, it can still just be a beautiful thing to look at.” T

hat tension between form and feeling is something he deliberately maintains.

Art empowered him at a very young age. Bico was eleven when he arrived in South Africa. His family were refugees from Mozambique during the unrest of the 1970s.

“It was a culture shock,” he said. “I could not speak English. I was going through puberty. Everything I thought was my life had been left behind.”

Words failed, so he started drawing.

“I would doodle in schoolbooks to avoid having to speak. That is how I got noticed.” It became his way in. His way forward.

An artist of many interests

Later, he studied English Literature, Psychology and History of Art. He has also explored astronomy and even tried his hand at self-driving vehicle coding. All of it makes sense in context. Bico is a man driven by curiosity rather than convention.

His creative process is instinctual.

“Especially with abstracts, it is about putting something on the canvas, anything, and then waiting for it to start speaking to you,” he said.

“You must be quiet enough to hear what the painting wants. Sometimes I start with a figure, then destroy it, abstract it, layer it until you cannot see it anymore. But it is still there, part of the structure.”

He paints what he sees and what he feels. Often without meaning to.

“You do not need to plan a work,” he said. “You just need to be honest, and it will come out. The world we live in, it is already inside us.”

When he’s done with a painting, the rest is up to the viewer.

Years ago, every time someone bought one of his works, he felt like he was giving up part of himself.

“Now, when someone buys a painting, it is the end of my relationship with it. It is the start of the work’s real life. It goes off and finds a home, gets loved in a new way.”

Metamorphosis opens at Art Eye Gallery in Dainfern in July.

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