Developing a project with the landscape as the protagonist is never an easy task. It is always in force and with multiple perspectives. Whatever the place from where the architect does it, he has at his disposal, a huge historical deposit he can resort to. However, in this universe, it can eventually miss and fall into the trap of repeating styles. However, many artists have managed to create over the years, various personal looks to interpret it and communicate their varied messages.
This is evidenced, the large number of pieces in different collections, galleries and national museums. The Conarte gallery is no exception. Its collection protects representative works from the Costa Rican landscape from different eras and varied styles. Exposing this particular selection, forces reflection and above all to perpetuate the idea of the landscape and its historical construction, as Raffaele Milani notes very rightly in his book in his book Landscape artsaying: “The landscape is a spiritual form that melts vision and creativity; because each look creates an ideal landscape (…) when we see a landscape, we are facing a work of art at the time of birth.”
As a human expression, the landscape is not only pictorial, so it is literary, geographical and even fantastic, thus each writer or painter corresponds to a landscape: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) The seas of the South; to Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) the Congo; to Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) Tahiti; to Herman Melville (1819-1891) the ocean, to Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) Aix-en-Provence, to José Eustasio Rivera Salas (1888-1928) the Amazon jungle and Carlos Salazar Herrera (1906-1980) The Costa Rican landscape.
In Costa Rica in particular, the landscape arises as a need for art, to “create” a national theme. It was the ideal argument that was perfectly heated in the thought of the time. Eugenia Zavaleta, in its publication, “the homeland in the Costa Rican landscape,” proposes as a starting point this topic, at the end of the 19th century, with literature mainly. Figures like Manuel González Zeledón (Magon stories1896-1933) and Aquileo J. Echeverría (Conherías1905), “They sought to inspire themselves in the Costa Rican, in the native, more than there was great ignorance with respect to the environment itself and history,” writes Eugenia Zavaleta.
It is thanks to the exhibitions of plastic arts, which were held at the National Theater between 1928 – 1937, that the landscape began to take strength and the house of adobes prominence in the painting. The atmosphere that wrapped them became utopian: the houses, “look like newly built constructions that only a few days ago were painted. Nature surrounds them, but correctly arranged. In addition, it is embodied with exalted exuberance; trees, vegetation and mountains star vivacity, fullness and imponencia, under a limit sky (…). The quiet and peace imperates,” Zavaleta mentions.
This idea of nation construction, reconciled the landscape in Utopia, utopia in a dream. “In a variation on an ideal present, an ideal past and an ideal future (…). Each of them can be mythical or imaginary, or have a real basis in history.” (Claeys, 2011.). And from there, that these landscapes perfectly fit this concept of utopia, which becomes a partner of the political recognition of the time. Where nevertheless not everything is peace, not everything is calm.
Today, in the event of the excessive development of the cities, the city itself is transformed into landscape. Becoming unique portraits of the realities of each place. The protagonists are no longer the mountains, the rivers or the forests, now the buildings, the neighborhoods and their parks, the vehicles and the passers -by, “the myth of the landscape”, as the British historian Simon Schama disappears and, suddenly, many spectators are reflected in a overflowing urban landscape in which they are recognized. In the city the landscape becomes “an attitude” as noted by the landscape architect, Jimena Martignoni.
“The inhabitants are part of the landscape as the landscape is of ourselves. A landscape is always loaded with souls,” writes the philosopher Dorelia Barahona. The chaos of cities such as Latin American and Costa Rican in particular, add energy to urban artists and artists. Thus, the Rural Arcadia gives way to urban chaos, however “the art-city relationship is not one, it cannot be raised in singular. It varies in space and time, and covers creations in which something of the world’s worldview converges; with the material and social conditions of urban space,” notes María José Monge.
And what seemed impossible, the imprint of Adobes’ house begins to be erased, not from the collective imaginary, but if the artist’s thought and thus, little by little, contemporary artists are immersing themselves in research processes that bring them closer to issues related to climate change, with migrations, with water problems, leaving aside that idyllic landscape.
The landscape becomes neighborhoods (Emilio Willie), in urban memories (Francisco Amighetti), in Tugurios (Rafael, Felo García and Rudy Espinoza), in Magic Realism (Isidro with Wong), in Volcanes (Luis Chacón), in synthesis (Carlos Poveda), in group (Bocaracá) or in garbage (Tomas Sánchez). The collection that protects Conar you is proof of this: the works elaborated by various artists show the multiple looks that the landscape can represent.
Conarte Gallery is located in Montelimar de Calle Blancos. The exhibition can be visited from Monday to Friday from 10 am to 4 pm until May 23. On May 7 at 7 PM, Eugenia Zavaleta will offer a talk. WhatsApp 8766-6547.
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