Profile

For Racso Jugarap, creativity is less a career choice than a vital impulse. As a child in the Philippines, he instinctively made and assembled things, without ever thinking of himself as an artist, a word that was almost taboo in his cultural environment. It was only after he moved to Brussels in 2015 that his view of himself changed. Two years later, in 2017, he decided to devote himself entirely to his practice. 

Wire was an obvious choice for him. The son of a jewelry designer, he grew up in his father's workshop, watching gold and silver being transformed into precious objects. Too young to handle precious metals, he collected the wire left on the floor, used to bind the molds. These fragments became his first materials. The workshop became a testing ground, and the tools became his playthings. 

However, his path led him elsewhere. Europe, a career as a chef, several cities. Until that ordinary day in a hardware store: standing in front of rolls of metal wire, a sensory memory resurfaced. The gesture came back immediately. Malleable and flexible, the wire became the medium for a personal language.  

A self-taught artist, Racso works without sketches. Flat surfaces make him uneasy; his ideas must be born in space. The thread acts as three-dimensional ink, capturing intuition and giving shape to emotions. The process is direct, sometimes feverish: an image emerges, born of a memory or meditation, and the artist isolates himself in his studio until dawn. 

Nothing is truly premeditated. The dimensions are revealed once the work is completed, even if it means improvising to get it out of the studio. Some pieces take shape in a matter of hours, others require months, depending on the intensity of the moment or the approach of an exhibition.