Jonatan Alfaro — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Apr 30

Apr 30 Jonatan Alfaro

Jonatan Alfaro / Visual Artist
Currently lives and works in San Jose , Costa Rica.

“How does one represent landscape and territory without becoming a contemplative landscape artist idealizing nature, nor a Cartesian cartographer putting the earth in order?

"The abstract paintings of Jonathan Alfaro are, precisely, those pictorial thoughts where such a language might just be possible. Each one of his canvases creates a pictorial distance with respect to the “real” color of the referent in nature he is painting, whether one is merely looking at the landscape or through a memory.

But more important than whether or not we see or recognize a landscape, his abstract paintings possess neither background nor figure. It confronts us with a limit of contamination among each one of these categories, and, as the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek says of the paintings of Rothko (which contained a sort of osmosis between the background and the figure in the painting), it is the passing of reality into the real."

Inti Guerrero, Art Director and Curator.

In my paintings, the contrasted colors, colliding head on, reign supreme. In delicately expressed, tenuous settings , I let things appear. They are evocative settings, which can be associated with the landscape, although it is a personal landscape, fractured and torn, in which we see intriguing openings.

They are like a fleeting punctuation that opens up onto unknown panoramas. In these we see architectonic deviations that allow us to perceive corners and far-off, complicated settings. I seek out these transparencies in my paintings: in tears in space we contemplate other dimensions that would appear to be constructed, delicately, subtly, I orchestrate them, in some parts denying them, suggesting them in others, whispering to the spectator of the fragile, but not for that weakened, balance of this world.