Alonso Durán, born in the Costa Rican town of Grecia, fuses mathematics and art in his paintings, an approach underpinned by his understanding of both disciplines having gained degrees in Fine Art and Engineering. Durán’s works are rooted in abstraction as he employs a warm, earthy colour palette punctuated by bold, colourful highlights, evoking a sense of vitality and energy. His canvases come alive with turbulent, undulating forms reminiscent of the country’s oceans or untamed landscapes, which are anchored by geometric shapes created using mathematical formulas.

At the core of Durán’s work lies a fascination with chaos and the underlying order concealed within. Embracing the principles of calculus, specifically the realm of “Topology”, Durán’s work bridges the chaotic and the ordered, tapping into the mathematical explanations behind seemingly disordered phenomena. He says, “only one line appears” in the non-uniform universe, where the interplay of time, space, speed and gravity find stabilisation through his introduction of lines and axes.

Beyond the mathematical precision, Durán’s landscapes evoke a certain mood and emotion. For each painting, he creates his own colours that never repeat, and coupled with a free hand application of lines, Durán injects an air of spontaneity. Each painting is a unique language, a snapshot of a moment in time that will continue to move. “I’m trying to visually represent the fact there are a million possibilities happening all at the same time,” says Alonso. “It is the universe”.

Durán has shown extensively across Costa Rica, most recently at Talentum Gallery in San José, the Cartago Municipal Museum and Liberia’s Hidden Garden Art Gallery, as well as internationally in countries, such as the USA, Panama and Mexico.