Contemporary Costa Rican Artists

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present Seguimos: Contemporary Art in Costa Rica, a group exhibition co-curated by Hannah Sloan, on view March 30 through May 18, 2024. An Artist Talk will be held Saturday, March 30th at 3:00pm, directly followed by an Artist Reception from 4:30 - 6:30pm.

Seguimos features installation, video, photography, painting, works on paper and sculpture by an intergenerational group of thirteen Costa Rican artists, the majority of whom are highly regarded in Central America, but have never exhibited in the United States. The artists in this exhibition reflect a spectrum of interests and concerns facing Costa Ricans today, five of the artists identify with the queer community and all position themselves within the broadest developments in contemporary art, with particular focus on the topics of body, identity and place.

The artists:
Adrián Arguedas Ruano, Alina González, Allegra Pacheco, Christian Wedel, Isaac Loría, Javier Calvo, La Cholla Jackson, Lucía Howell, Luciano Goizueta, Matias Sauter Morera, Mimian Hsu Chen, Priscilla Romero-Cubero, and Valiente Pastel.

The title “Seguimos” comes from an installation of one hundred twenty works on paper by Priscilla Romero-Cubero, a conceptual artist and researcher in the fields of graphic art and contemporary body practices. Translated as “we continue” or “we keep going,” “Seguimos” is a striking example of the artist’s signature printmaking technique, developed during the course of her PhD studies. Latexgraphy, employs liquid latex to register the imprint of human fingers and other body parts onto a reusable matrix. These fragments of rubber, resembling torn balloons, are inked and transferred onto delicate Japanese paper. The matrices and corresponding “prints,” represent an archive of people the artist has encountered, and while highly personal imprints of skin, they offer a record of human life without reference to sex, gender, nationality, age, religion or economic status. “Seguimos” is a large sequence of imprints, where groups of four fingers are slashed through by a diagonal tally mark. According to the artist, this reference to counting “appeals to memory, to sequence and also to resistance. We continue counting the days and nights, the deaths, the victims, the injustices, the disappeared and the silenced; we continue counting and discounting those present and absent...Thus, life and memory add up events that refuse to be forgotten, to be part of a past hidden and veiled by history.”

Like Priscilla Romero-Cubero, other artists in Seguimos use the body as a focal point for explorations of identity, both personal and political. Conceptual artist, Javier Calvo, engages his

body (often to extremes) in corporeal and temporal performative works, documented in still photography and video, reminiscent of Yves Klein, Charles Ray and Dennis Oppenheim. Calvo’s work questions what it means to be Costa Rican in the context of other Central American nations, clearly recognizing his country’s unique historical links to ideas of democracy, peace and even whiteness. In his work, El Blanco es Relativo, a photograph depicts a tattoo with these words emblazoned on his pale skin. Likewise, his photo sequence, DIS, documents a sunburn on his chest in the shape of Central America which gradually fades and peels, revealing his original “whiteness.”

Interdisciplinary artist and ballet dancer, Lucía Howell, takes body oriented video art into the Costa Rican landscape, creating a mythological and symbolically charged realm. In her video loop Villi, her nude figure appears partially camouflaged in fragments of mirror that reflect sunlight and other elements of her natural surroundings in Cerro Pelado. Howell’s stillness and the lush soundscape that accompanies the video, create a commanding space of anticipation, where the distinction between body and landscape begins to dissolve.

For decades, revered painter, Alina González, has been rendering bodies in thick, violent strokes, reminiscent of Francis Bacon. Her black and white portraits of people in pursuit of power and formidable boxers have influenced younger generations of Costa Rican painters. Alongside these well known subjects, the artist produces personal works that reflect on their own identity as a transgender woman, including searing nude self portraits, portraits of media icons like Bridget Bardot, and transgressive bodies including the “stars” of the transgender pornography industry.

The eroticized body also plays a role in the work of Valiente Pastel, a self-taught artist who uses irreverence and humor to discuss contemporary topics like queer culture in Latin America, homoeroticism and female empowerment. “Guided by my sentiments and instinct, I paint over advertisements, photographs or found objects which I directly intervene and transform in order to tell stories. Through my paintings I attempt to normalize and satirize human and sexual behaviors that are usually hidden, shameful or prohibited in a conservative society.”

Bodies also feature prominently in the work of interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Allegra Pacheco. Her intimately scaled paintings of boxers and MMA fighters resemble freeze frames from a television broadcast, and are drawn from tutorials, photo archives, and fanfare she studies online. Pink hues are employed to feminize a hypermasculine sport, while stark blacks and reds emphasize the gladiator quality of women fighters. Along with painting, Pacheco will present “Blood Sugar,” an autobiographical video about training to fight. Her multimedia work, including film, installation, photography and painting is on view in a highly acclaimed exhibition “Dear Salaryman” at Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica through March 30th.

La Cholla Jackson’s assemblage work is often the residue of her drag performances. She contorts and recontextualizes discarded “high” fashion such as pointy stilettos, wigs, and pumped sneakers into audacious sculpture with a gritty Arte Povera street sensibility. A critical

response to our current sociological condition, where “the third world must take charge of the first world’s waste,” Jackson converts once glamorous cultural detritus into what she calls “trash-bestialism.” This redefinition of objects that have outlived their “purpose” gives the artist “a space where I can be myself without judgements, especially of my family members; a space of refuge without constraints.”

Mimian Hsu Chen’s multifaceted work is often linked to cultural hybridization and acculturation of the Chinese immigrant on the American continent. As a native of Costa Rica, and a descendant of Taiwanese immigrants, she occupies a unique intersectional place racially and culturally. For Seguimos, the artist will debut a 26 foot long “waterfall” composed of diaphanous fabric embellished by hand-embroidery, beads, and pearls. This object represents her longing to lessen the distance separating her from her Taiwanese family (over 15,000 km). The artist has imagined skimming the surface of the ocean to capture untethered bits of seaweed, algae and shells that float between Costa Rica and Taiwan. By transforming that collected surface into a “waterfall,” she will collapse space and transcend circumstances that otherwise seem immovable.

After relocating to Berlin in 2012, photographer, Matias Sauter Morera, became acutely aware of the significance that tropical nature held within his understanding of his Costa Rican identity. His lush, psychologically charged photographs depicting infinite spans of untamed jungle, signify a return to the landscape of his childhood and a reexamination of memories formed there. “I seek to propose an identity rooted in the perpetual presence of tropical nature in our lives and its impact on our emotional states.” His series “New World Tropics” offers an alternative perspective on tropical and biodiverse countries like Costa Rica, often associated with paradise, vacation or tranquility - one that acknowledges the darkness, danger, chaos, and mystery that jungles also evoke.

Psychologically fertile landscapes also emerge in the work of painter Isaac Loría, who gathers inspiration during early morning walks around Herradura, an area of beach-adjacent farmland on the Pacific coast. His gestural paintings have a forthright immediacy, expressively capturing the beautiful but harsh environment, where high temperatures and humidity often become extreme by midday. Self-taught, yet fully versed in Velázquez and other classical masters, Loría brings an extensive art historical awareness to his remote and rustic environment, often painting outdoors amidst mango and banana trees, tacking his unstretched canvases to humble structures on his grandfather’s farm.

Christian Wedel is constantly seeking new perspectives on the representation of nature. Employing a diverse range of media, his practice is rooted in an inventive and somewhat anthropomorphic animation of landscapes on the Caribbean coast. There, he observes an alignment and transference of qualities between plants and human bodies that occurs in the density of the tropics, constructing micro narratives about interspecies relationships. In his recent paintings, rubbery, nouveau plant shapes are distilled to sensual silhouettes and his color palette is limited to a subtle chromatic field of forest greens and aquas, creating an intimate experience of tropical futurism.

In the tradition of Costa Rica’s most lauded 20th century printmaker, Francisco Amighetti, Adrián Arguedas Ruano is considered one of the greatest exponents of engraving and woodcut in Latin America, in addition to his influential contributions in painting and sculpture. Every August, his native town of Barva de Heredia celebrates a festival dedicated to San Bartholomé with masquerade parades, a proud custom revered in his community, while fading elsewhere. Arguedas commemorates this ritual in graphic works possessing the raw theatricality of James Ensor’s crowds, as well as the hauntingly distorted puppetry of German Expressionism. His current exhibition at El Museo de Arte Costarricense features his bravura paintings and prints on this subject, as well as Arguedas’ hand-made masks, in the tradition of his great uncle, a legendary mask maker.

Luciano Goizueta is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural impresario whose contributions to the Costa Rican art scene are critical to the preservation of contemporary art history. His most important curatorial endeavor to date was the inception of Salitatemporal in 2019, a conceptually driven art space that has hosted dozens of Costa Rican artists. Like Salitatemporal, most of Goizueta’s projects are conceived as open-ended. Colección de Ahoras/Collection of Nows, is one such project - “a video without beginning or end, a section of fragments, fifteen years of wandering with a recording machine in tow.” Currently composed of 68 videos taken between 2004 and 2019, it remains a collection of moments in the life of a Costa Rican artist, a self-reflective document and testament to the idea that “we continue.”

About the Curator

Hannah Sloan is a former gallery owner (Sloan Projects) who has been curating independently throughout Los Angeles since 2005. For the past three years she has divided her time between Los Angeles and Costa Rica, where her father lived for several decades.