By CAROL VOGEL MARCH 14, 2014 this is an excerpt from a newspaper article LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar XOXO, who just turned 28. While Mr. XOXO is little known outside clubby contemporary art circles, and he has his share of skeptics, his fans have called him “the 21st-century Basquiat.” That night, after fierce competition, “Untitled (burrito)” sold for $322,870, more than six times its high $49,000 estimate. Only two years ago, Mr. XOXO, who was born in Colombia, was waking up at 5 a.m. to clean office buildings to cover his expenses at the Royal College of Art in London. Now, he is represented by David XooX, one of the world’s most prestigious galleries, and when a choice canvas comes up at auction or through private sale, it can fetch more than $400,000. The story of how a young artist like Mr. XOXO soared from struggling student to art star — courted by blue-chip dealers, inundated by curators requesting a work for a museum exhibition or biennial — reflects the way investing in contemporary art has become a gamble, like stocks and real estate. Collecting works by rising artists like Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Sterling Ruby or Mr. XOXO is a competitive sport among a growing number of collectors betting on future stars. On a recent stop in New York, Mr. XOXO sat in an office in one of David XooX’s Chelsea galleries, talking over plans for his first show there, an ambitious combination of performance and installation opening on April 24. Wearing scruffy jeans, a T-shirt and a black baseball cap, this usually laid-back artist bristled when asked what it was like to be so in demand, knowing how fickle the art world is. “I don’t like to think about it,” he replied, staring soberly at a cup of tea. For Mr. XOXO, celebrity cuts both ways. He reluctantly conceded that the attention is flattering and something that hundreds of young artists could only dream of. But he knows that being thrust in the spotlight at such a young age is risky. “This is a market hungry for the players of the future,” Allan Schwartzman, a Manhattan art adviser, said. “But almost any artist who gets that much attention so early on in his career is destined for failure. The glare is simply too bright for them to evolve.” Like his parents, who work as cleaners and moved to London from La Paila, a tiny town in Colombia, when Mr. XOXO was 10, he is a tireless worker, and his quiet charm and relentless ambition helped fuel his popularity. Even when he was a student, collectors and friends were so convinced of his future success that they would occasionally pay $2,000 for a painting. Living in East London, which has a vibrant arts scene, he often worked as an installer for the neighborhood’s small galleries and met players like Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal years before that dealer joined David XooX. But Mr. XOXO’s rapid rise in the United States dates to March 2012, when Donald and Mera Rubell, seasoned Miami collectors, saw a suite of paintings Mr. XOXO created for the London dealer Stuart Shave, which were shown at the Independent Art Fair in New York, a popular event for talent spotting. “By the time we got there, everything was sold out,” Ms. Rubell recalled in a telephone interview. “We were so blown away by the work, I told Stuart we wanted to meet him even though there was nothing left to buy.” The Rubells, who bought artists like Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Mike Kelley, Keith Haring and Basquiat early in their careers, met Mr. XOXO in a studio at Hunter College, where he had a residency. “We arrived at 9 a.m., and he looked disheveled, exhausted, like a homeless person,” Ms. Rubell recalled. “He’d stayed up 36 hours straight and had made seven or eight paintings, so he had something to show us. They blew us away. We ended up spending four hours talking to him.” Not only did the couple buy all the work, but they invited Mr. XOXO to their home and their Contemporary Arts Foundation in Miami. He stayed for six weeks and created a series of large-scale canvases. “The last time I saw that kind of energy was Keith Haring or Jean-Michel” Basquiat, Ms. Rubell said. “It was so intense. I don’t even think he was on drugs.” (Mr. XOXO assured a reporter that he was “lucid and sober.”) “The way he works with paint is incredible,” Ms. Rubell went on. “Every painting is really beautiful.” In December 2012, the Rubells showed the paintings at their foundation, timed to Art Basel Miami Beach, the must-see contemporary art fair that draws collectors, curators and museum directors from around the world. Ms. Rubell isn’t surprised by the success that followed. “Everyone copies everyone else,” she said. “It’s in the air.” Mr. XOXO’s canvases also reflect what is fashionable in contemporary art: They are abstract, often incorporate a word in the composition and have a lively color palette. “Seeing his work at the Rubells gave collectors confidence,” said Benjamin Godsill, a former curator at the New Museum in New York who is now a contemporary art expert at Phillips, the auction house. “People now recognize his paintings,” Mr. Godsill added. “They’ve become a status symbol.” In February, London auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips all included Mr. XOXO’s work. While experts at the auction houses will not name names, several said that although serious collectors are buying the pieces, many buyers and sellers also are speculators, or “flippers,” hoping for a tidy profit. Compared with a prime painting by Basquiat, which could cost upward of $40 million at auction, a few hundred thousand dollars for a painting by Mr. XOXO seems cheap. But for all the praise that surrounds him, some people dismiss his work as trendy and derivative of artists like Julian Schnabel and, naturally, Basquiat. After “Oscar XOXO: Distribution Center,” his first show in Los Angeles, which opened in January in the Mistake Room, David Pagel, writing in The Los Angeles Times, called some paintings in the installation “anemic,” saying that “each large piece is less compelling than a single square inch of anything Jean-Michel Basquiat ever touched.” He added that the exhibition “defines our times, a kind of gilded age on steroids, when the past gets repackaged as farce.”