Paradojas: Figurative Realism Finds New Urgency in Costa Rica

Paradojas opens this week at the coveted Calderón Guardia Museum in San José, bringing together five Latin American artists working under the banner of SOMA Collective. Opening on 12 June, it's a rare opportunity to see this scale of figurative realism in one space: 37 works curated together and spanning five distinct practices, unified by a shared concern with contradiction.

All are welcome for the opening reception. Museo Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia, San José. Thursday 12 June, 7pm. On until 19 June.

The artists include Emilia Cantor, Sylvia Laks, Sofía Ruiz and Gilberto Ramírez, who are represented by MÍRAME Fine Art, and Mario Kolomiiets. This exhibition signals an investment in the region’s figurative painters and a timely response to the growing international appetite for narrative-rich, technically ambitious painting.

The exhibition’s title offers the clearest entry point. A paradox, in the classical sense, is a disruption. The artists here use realism to question what we take for granted, exploring the contradiction between what we perceive and what is real. Exploring our beliefs around perception, selfhood, power, and memory, their subjects are recognisably human and their techniques echoing centuries-old painterly traditions.

Read on as we explore the artists futher.

Realism as Inquiry

Costa Rica has long supported a quietly rigorous figurative painting scene. But Paradojas signals a more philosophical turn, a confident staging of realism as a site of inquiry. This figurative work is intented to unsettle the viewer rather than evoke nostalgia or provide comfort.

Gilberto Ramírez’s "La Bienvenida" (below) is a good example of this. A child sits near a winged cat, surrounded by sea-creature hybrids and shadowy interiors. The brushwork is meticulous, but the emotional logic is elusive. For Ramírez, solitude is a generative space; his paintings don't offer answers but they certainly create more questions in the viewer. “Reality is impossible to describe with certainty,” Ramírez writes. “What remains for me is to feel it as an event.”

Gilberto Ramírez, La Bienvenida, Oil on canvas

Nearby, Emilia Cantor’s large square-format canvases imagine a parallel Costa Rica, complete with glowing livestock and surreal topographies. "The Luminous Cattle (El Ganado Luminoso)" places the Guanacaste cow in a distorted rural setting with a ghostly, witchy figure standing nearby, suggesting a world where the rules of commerce, energy, and environment have shifted. Cantor’s paintings, particuarly in the 130x130cm square format, ask what counts as normal, and why.

Cantor explores alternative worlds as she challenges the viewer’s preconceived ideas of reality with an innovative approach to colour and classical tools. Her surrealist canvases are transformed into symphonies of colour that feature vast areas of emotionally charged contrasts, often with pastel and vibrant colours juxtaposing against stark black and greys, creating visually striking harmonies that evoke a sense of otherworldliness.

Emilia Cantor, The Luminous Cattle (El Ganado Luminoso), Oil on canvas

Monsters We Know

Sofía Ruiz confronts a different kind of paradox with the familiarity of fear. Her work stages the monstrous as something normal that we all live with in various degrees and disguises. In her striking painting "Los Vecinos (The Neighbors)", a stoic child sits beside a pink beast, equal parts cartoon and grotesque. The pink monster is alarming and unsettling, yet the child does not display panic or fear. Her textured surfaces, mixing oil and acrylic, mirror that tension, where the gestures move from fluid strokes to heavy, textured impasto.

For Ruiz, horror is something absorbed by us all, and it is not always a loud and dominant expereince. This pink creature is a companion for the boy, perhaps a part of him. This makes this painting, and other works by Ruiz, psycholigical portraits that are real and strangely not completely fantastical.

Sylvia Laks, Los Vecinos (The Neighbors), Oil on canvas

Allegory in Suspension

Sylvia Laks’ "Capital Errors" series interprets the so-called seven deadly sins as abstract conditions, each one gestating in a cocoon suspended in space. A trained stained-glass artist, Laks brings that precision into her painting, but the results are dreamlike rather than decorative. For example, in "The Vomit of Greed", a male figure emerges from a spiral shell, vomiting stones, which are seen as symbols of inert wealth. The work hovers between religious allegory and psychological theatre.

Laks does not aim to moralise and views these sins are ongoing processes that we all experience and struggle with. The paintings unfold in atmospheric voids, accompanied by birds and body fragments, all carefully rendered. The works feel suspended in time, as if morality were a kind of weather system rather than a code.

Sylvia Laks, The Vomit of Greed, Oil on canvas

Fractured Belonging

Mario Kolomiiets completes the exhibition with a meditation on identity and displacement. His paintings reflect on Latin America’s layered history of imposed systems, religious, cultural, economic, and what it means to belong to a place shaped by fracture. Kolomiiets’ work lingers in uncertainty and does not attempt clarity or resolution.

A Region in Focus

Coming just a week after Jesús Mejía’s opening at Galería Matices, Paradojas adds momentum to what increasingly feels like a pivotal moment for figurative painting in the region, which we are seeing is attracting critical interest and collector attention. The kind of realism practiced by SOMA's artists feels incresingly revelant. In Paradojas, the works go further. They engage with a world in crisis, but without sacrificing beauty or painterly technique.

Paradojas runs until 19 July at the Museo Calderón Guardia in San José. It's an unmissable opportunity to see some of the region’s most compelling figurative work gathered under one roof.

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