Aparición y latencia, was a solo exhibition in the artist-run space Cero Uno, San José, Costa Rica, 2022.

What is your relationship with painting?

R.C: I see painting as a dialogue with our experience in life based on memories, sensations, and imagination.

Paint is this colloidal substance that through its application allows the appearance of all these perceptions on the support. During the pictorial process I allow a flow between me and the painting. This is a dialogue with myself and with what I perceive and remember, there are many associations that are generated in this phase. Once the work is finished, is in between a state of latency and a static dynamism.

Even though you teach human anatomy classes at the Faculty of Medicine, the figures in your paintings are unrealistic. What is the reason for this decision?

R.C: These unrealistic forms are the result of a freer perception of forms determined by the pictorial process. I like the elements in their primordial state, and I am interested in that limit between the body of the figures and the space they inhabit, bringing that space to the fore and treating it as a colloidal substance. From the physical and chemical perspective, both air and water are considered as fluids, one more dense than the other. I am interested in representing space as something ambiguous between the aerial, the aquatic, the vegetal, the telluric or even the magmatic; I even imagine the bodily perception of air in the body as something like what aquatic life experiences when moving through the water.

Many times, when we talk about your paintings, adjectives such as primordial, original appear. Could you tell us more about your interest in these ideas?

R.C: I am interested in innocence, appreciating the essential as a disposition towards life, to marvel at the world and be able to appreciate its simpler aspects on a day-to-day basis. I tend to idealize the so called primitive; I imagine it as a freer way of existence and more connected with the uncertain and mysterious aspects of life. So human beings could not explain many phenomena in a scientific way, and this led to the emergence of cosmogonies that, in many cases, seem amazing to me. I connect with that free use of imagination through the pictorial process, which already has a strong historical link with the primitive, as is the case with Rock Art.

Interview with Lucía Madriz for the exhibition Aparición y latencia

Cero Uno, 2022.