Contreras is interested in exploring the effects of different arrangements of colours and shapes on visual perception. He approaches the surface to represent on it an impression to the viewer through some elements like verticality and incompleteness. In his work there are two points to recognize immediately: the materials used and the process. The materials come from the artisan and industrial world, in which himself is immersed, where the work of the “painter” have within to form part of the artwork. Contreras also worked as a house painter, following an artisan family tradition (his grandfather was a house painter and his mother is a professional restorer). His work is both autobiographic and a performance operation. His aim is to change the low profile perception of an artisan painter into an artist, in a self-reflexive, cathartic and analytic way. The result is a piece of installation art, made up by cotton fabric, vinyl or a plasterboard panel on a frame built with his own hands. That’s the reason he doesn’t consider these works purely paintings but sculptures/installations. Sebastian Contreras is inspired by the Analytic Painting of the 1970s, those were years in which painting was in a situation of stalemate and defining oneself as a painter was anachronistic.