S. Cifuentes was born in Concepción, Chile, on the 7th of July 1966. When he was still a boy, he excelled in drawing, which along with his poems and short musical compositions began to mould his adolescent persona into a romantic and an existentialist form.
During his first phase he took to descriptive realism, and showed great mastery of forms and an elegant and contained use of colour in his landscapes, which were his main subject. In 1987 he married Lizeth who became the first subject of his first portraits and nudes, with which he discovered a new challenge in the human form. This he has proved by making the nude the subject which from the 1990s has dominated almost all of his canvases. From their beginning, his portraits became an important part of this artist’s work. He is not happy merely to find a simple likeness of the person who is being painted: in his search for perfectionism he hopes to capture the gestures and crucial features of the person. He is associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, because of the interesting interpretive brushstrokes in his compositions, and the effects of volume and light do not seem to be difficult to him. For eleven years he directed his own painting workshops (1992-2003) in Concepción, Chile, with a large number of people with whom he has exhibited important works in the city. Since 2002 he has taken part in international art fairs of which Caracas, Buenos Aires, California and New York are worthy of mention. Today we are likely to find Sergio surrounded by large canvases with stunning scenes of beautiful dancers. It deeply evokes the harmony and the beauty of the careful poses. He has been immersed in his “Dancers” series for over two years and it will shortly be launched. According to the artist: “ Dancers are a inexhaustible resource which is tremendously seductive, by depicting them I can transmit things; they take comfort in each other, they confide in each other, they wait for auditions, they gaze at the audience from behind the curtains and they apply make-up.
