Raised in a family where the creative sound and smell of the brush were part of his daily routine, Rafael Amir Candanedo, aka Amir Lucky, was destined to become an artist.

Amir Lucky has built his artistic identity through the sumptuous combination of abstract and cartoons’ elements – incorporating techniques from urban and contemporary art such as spray paint, the overlapping of images or blasting.

His visual language is the result of a long introspective and technical exercise - revealing his admiration for the large formats of the Italian Renaissance’ Old Masters as well as for more modern techniques such as the art of tattooing and the deep imprint of graffiti which he absorbed while traveling in Europe.

In his compositions on canvas, Amir Lucky randomly, but strategically, distributes the seemingly chaotic rips, smudges, and smears characterizing the trace of “deterioration” of street art. Though, he does not use those components to represent actual deterioration but rather as expressionist semiotics endowing the work with character – like someone recreating the personality of an individual through his scars.  Among his subjects can be found popular and iconic characters reinterpreted within their own symbolic language as if they were letters of Amir Lucky’s visual alphabet. Amir Lucky represents his “abstract toons” by fragmenting and breaking down their forms, segmenting and overlapping them.

Amir Lucky investigates the correlation between emotional, psychological and social well-being - and how, all together, they impact the artist’ mental health, behavior and creative process. It resulted in how the constant chase of aesthetics and beauty has been conditioning and fascinating our societies for centuries. Not surprising if his creations depict characters with uncontrolled smiles, one of the most sophisticated visual statements of beauty in today's world and a transversal cut that affects the semiotic plane as well as the world of ideas.