Gallery 4

AuTOYbiography

22 April - 3 May 2026

Opening night

24 April | 6 - 8 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm (please note last day of exhibition ends at 3pm)

ARTIST  STATEMENT 

In AuTOYbiography, Cesar Sánchez Huertas enters into a conversation with his own inner essence: the artist he always dreamed of becoming but had gradually set aside. The series reflects a deeply personal period of rediscovery. Through symbolic arrangements of his own childhood toys and subtle references to tarot archetypes, the works explore memory, identity, and transformation, tracing a journey of rupture, reflection, and reconciliation with a creative impulse that had long remained dormant.

At a certain moment in one's life, an internal discomfort can emerge. A quiet sense of misalignment. For Cesar, this realisation arrived when his scientific career was growing and thriving, yet the thing he longed for the most was slowly being left behind: painting. The Growing Up Paradox speaks to this inner contradiction: The disconnection that can appear between adult life and the inner essence, creating a tension that eventually becomes impossible to ignore.

Rather than avoiding this discomfort, the artist chose to face it. In doing so, a small but persistent spark began to take shape. A desire that had existed for so long it was almost forgotten. From this moment emerged The Wish, a quiet declaration of intent. In it, the artist makes a pact with his inner child: the promise to nurture that creative voice by allowing painting to take its place in his life once again.

From there, the works unfold as a sequence of lived moments and transformations. The innocent impulse of The Fool, or the necessary rupture of old roles and expectations in The Tower and The Star. This journey continues shaping up into different artworks, concluding with The World, where the conflict that initiated the journey begins to resolve. What emerges is not perfection, but a sense of integration: a reconciliation with a part of the self that had long remained unseen.

AuTOYbiography is also a record of artistic exploration. Each painting presents a new challenge, whether through light, composition, or tonal relationships, allowing the artist to deepen his understanding of painting itself. Through careful observation, intuition, and a process of experimentation and trial and error, meaning gradually emerges while painting.

In bringing these works together, Cesar reflects on the process of becoming. The quiet courage required to realign one's life with what has always felt essential.

ARTIST  BIOGRAPHY

Cesar Sánchez Huertas is a Spanish-born, Melbourne-based artist whose practice centres on figurative painting and illustration. His work often develops through carefully constructed scenes where light, observation and narrative elements come together to form evocative visual compositions.

Painting has been part of Cesar’s life since childhood. Growing up, he spent much of his time drawing imagined stories inspired by manga and comics, while also painting portraits of friends and family. Although he later pursued a career in science, this path fostered a deep curiosity about how things work and an experimental mindset shaped by observation and trial and error. In 2018, he moved to Australia to continue developing his scientific career.

In 2022, Cesar reached a turning point and decided to dedicate more time to painting after realising how much he had set it aside while focusing on his professional life. He began sharing illustrations online, which soon led to collaborations on illustrated children’s books, including My Mummy Loves Fudge (2023), and Missy Finds the Magic Within (to be published in 2026).

In 2023, he joined the Victorian Artists Society in Melbourne, where he developed a strong interest in oil painting and tonal realism. His work has since been presented in several exhibitions, and one of his paintings, The Wish, received the People’s Choice Award at the VAS 9x5 Exhibition in 2024.

His first solo exhibition, AuTOYbiography, marks an important moment in his artistic journey, bringing together a body of work that reflects a period of personal reflection and creative re-engagement.