Emmanuel Rodríguez Chaves will open his latest exhibition, Anamorfosis: pequeñas fracturas, at abra espacio in San José on Thursday 19 February, from 4 to 8pm.
The Costa Rican artist’s new body of work extends a decade-long inquiry into how images circulate, accumulate authority and, at times, begin to falter.
Presented on the fifth floor of Condominio Las Américas in experimental artist space abra.espacio, the exhibition positions itself within a broader unease about the status of the visual in contemporary life.
Rodríguez Chaves has long been concerned with the conditions under which images are produced and received. Trained at the University of Costa Rica, with further study at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin and a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne—where he was awarded a Melbourne Research Scholarship—he has built a practice that moves between painting, research and archival strategies.
His works often resemble collages, layering references from different temporal and geographic contexts. In doing so, they expose the ideological scaffolding that underpins what might otherwise appear neutral or documentary.
Emmanuel Rodriguez-Chaves, Montaña, Oil onc canvas, 132 x 106 cm
The title Anamorfosis: pequeñas fracturas suggests distortion and rupture. Anamorphosis, historically associated with perspectival tricks that reveal hidden images from oblique viewpoints, becomes here a metaphor for a present marked by instability. Rodríguez Chaves proposes that we inhabit a moment in which images no longer offer reassurance. Instead, they generate doubt. The “small fractures” of the subtitle point to subtle breaks—interruptions in narrative continuity, glitches in representation, shifts in scale or orientation—that unsettle the viewer’s confidence.
Recent works continue his use of found photographs, digital databases and printed matter as raw material. These sources are reworked through painting and compositional strategies that compress disparate scenes into a single pictorial field. Interiors appear alongside fragments of text; gestures are frozen mid-action; architectural spaces tilt or dissolve. The effect is one of suspended certainty. Viewers are asked to consider how memory is constructed and how collective imaginaries are shaped by the repetition of particular visual codes.
Central to Rodríguez Chaves’s project is a question about authorship and responsibility. If images circulate far beyond their point of origin, how should we account for the ideologies embedded within them? His paintings do not provide direct answers. They stage encounters between symbols, bodies and environments that feel at once familiar and estranged. By altering scale, cropping figures or overlaying graphic marks, he shifts the terms under which recognition takes place.
The exhibition arrives at a time when the reliability of images is under sustained pressure—from artificial intelligence to the saturation of social media feeds. What emerges are works that hold tension between nostalgia and critique, between personal memory and public narrative.
abra espacio, an independent art space in San José, provides an intimate setting for this investigation. The opening on 19 February invites a local audience to engage directly with a practice that has moved between Costa Rica, Europe and Australia while maintaining a sustained dialogue with the socio-political realities of the region.
Untitled (Paisaje), Oil on canvas, 70 x 71 cm | 27.7 x 28 in.
In Anamorfosis: pequeñas fracturas, Rodríguez Chaves continues to explore the instability of the visual field. His paintings suggest that fractures, however small, can accumulate into broader changes in perception. He situates his work within an urgent conversation about how we read images and how those images, in turn, influence our understanding of history and the present.
On view in San José in the coming weeks, Anamorfosis: pequeñas fracturas is well worth a visit. Those in the city should seek out Rodríguez Chaves’s latest exhibition at abra espacio - downtown San José - and take the measure of the space’s focused programme firsthand.
Emmanuel Rodríguez Chaves is represented by MÍRAME. Explore his artist page here.
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