Vicente Fita Botet
Artist in residence for the month of May 2025
I was born in Cuenca, Spain, in 1964 and I began painting at a very young age, inspired by my frequent visits to the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art in my hometown. I graduated in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Cuenca and after a period in Mulhouse, France, I completed my studies with a MFA from the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede, the Netherlands.
Since 2001, I have lived in Rotterdam, where I combine my work as an artist with teaching Spanish.
For years, I’ve been building an archive of photographs of objects I find by chance, abandoned on the street. Each one tells a personal story that captures my attention.
Beyond narrative, I’m interested in the archeological remains from the contemporary era, as what we discard offers information that reflects our lifestyle and reveals the cultural processes underlying human behavior.
In consumerism, the act of buying is often more satisfying that using the acquired object. The object-cause of desire, a term coined in Lacanian psychoanalysis, refers to the elusive element that motivates our desire, but is never fully attainable.
Chance is a crucial factor in my daily practice, as in the “Objet trouvé”, with which Dadaists and Surrealists challenged ideas about the true nature of art in the last century.
I make paintings by thoroughly copying photographs to achieve a faithful image. In this way, my work is closely related to photorealism, which recovered the value of mundane and unexceptional images in art. In addition to the choice of the subject matter, I agree with this movement in the non-hierarchical treatment of reality, seen in all of its awkwardness and randomness. For me, somehow, painting found objects is a means to produce readymades by hand.
