Last week we discussed how the green/rainy season affects and inspires many of Costa Rica's artists. This week, we're turning our attention to the artists who respond to what lies beneath the atmosphere - the earth! For Carlos Fernández, the work starts on the ground, literally.

Fernández is a painter whose materials carry a great sense of place, documenting the flora on the farm where he lives and works in his artist studio. His canvases often incorporate soil from the surrounding Santa Ana hills outside of the country's capital city, San José. From beeswax from local hives, and natural colourants like achiote and turmeric found on his farm, the materials he uses create works that hold a region, pressed into layers, spread across raw canvas, and set into form.

This blog follows a natural shift from our previous focus on season and air to something slower, denser, and mineral. Read on as we explore Fernández's practice and take a look at his new new paintings made with mixing soil into the acrylic paint.

Why Soil?

In Costa Rica, soil is anything but neutral. It is active, unstable, and materially rich, formed by centuries of volcanic activity, layered by cycles of rain and agricultural use. Soil in this region holds water, memory, nutrients, and, increasingly, waste.

Fernández sources the soil from his own land in Santa Ana, a microclimate that supports unique plant life due to its particular altitude and atmospheric conditions. He studies this ecosystem closely, referencing a centuries-old botanical text to understand which plants are native to the area and how they have been classified and used over time. His studio practice is grounded in the longer history of how land has been read, recorded, and used.

In the two new paintings, Fragments of a Garden 1 and Fragments of a Garden 2, this knowledge informs everything. The paintings function and behave like gardens with their layered surfaces, irregular forms and responsiveness to time.

New Paintings, Same Ground

In these two new paintings by Fernández, plants appear sketched lightly across the surface, their outlines barely anchored to the loose accumulation of pigment beneath, creating a muted but rich abstract quality.

Carlos Fernández, Fragments of a Garden 1, Soil and acrylic on canvas

In Fragments of a Garden 1, the soil appears as textured residue, scattered across the canvas in a way that feels embedded, giving you the feeling of looking through earth. Flecks of bright blue and red punctuate the muted tones, which provides points of visual tension within an otherwise subdued register. The title suggests something intimate or small—fragments—yet the work’s large square format shifts that expectation.  Scale here is experiential. The repeated forms and quiet, near-repetitive rhythms of colour and shape surround the viewer, suggesting a process of sediment, growth, and gradual accumulation.

Surface, Sediment, and Slowness

Fernández’s method of layering soil and pigment into carefully worked surfaces results in compositions that feel sedimented. Brushwork appears only in traces with soft outlines of leaf clusters, occasional petals, or even a butterfly. The surface absorbs light unevenly, drawing the eye not to any single point, but across a larger terrain. What appears delicate in line is grounded in a denser, almost geological body.

Carlos Fernández, Fragments of a Garden 2, Soil and acrylic on canvas

This approach is consistent with Fernández’s earlier works where the use of beeswax, turmeric, and natural pigment links the material of the painting directly to the ecology of place. In those works, colourants are unstable by design: turmeric oxidises, achiote shifts as it dries, wax softens in humidity. The surfaces resist uniformity, behaving more like ecosystems than traditional compositions.

While the Fragments series incorporates acrylic for structural stability, the conceptual logic remains unchanged. The soil is still present. The hand remains light. The painting records a physical process of collection, layering, and observation.

Natural Pigment, Cultural Memory | Achiote Painting

Among the materials Fernández uses is achiote, the deep red-orange seed of the Bixa orellana shrub, native to Central and South America. Achiote has been used for centuries by Indigenous peoples across Mesoamerica as body paint, textile dye, and food colouring. In pre-Columbian Costa Rica, it had ritual, practical, and symbolic functions. It was applied to skin during ceremony, used in medicinal preparations, and later incorporated into food and fabric by colonial and postcolonial households.

Carlos Fernández, Tierras Rojas, Soil, turmeric and acrylic on canvas

In the studio, achiote is ground and suspended in wax or oil. Its hue shifts between orange and rust depending on how it's prepared and how long it dries. For Fernández, this instability is a desirable feature. “The colour,” he notes, “is alive—it reacts to how you move it, how long you wait.”

He has also worked with turmeric, another plant with a long medicinal and cosmetic history in both Asia and the Americas. While not native to Central America, turmeric has become locally cultivated in small farms. Its colour—deep yellow—oxidises quickly, producing pale ochres and muddy browns after contact with air and moisture.

Looking Downward

There’s an instinct in contemporary painting to seek narrative, gesture, or figuration - to ask what a painting is “of.” Fernández's works aren’t specifically of something. They’re made with soil, wax, pigment and time.

Fernández offers an alternative mode of looking and experiencing art; his paintings evidence of a process as they become layered examples of a specific ecology and place. These two new paintings continue his practice of using his material knowledge over purely image-making, resulting in works that are grounded, in every sense of the word.

Fragments of a Garden 1 and Fragments of a Garden 2 are available on MÍRAME Fine Art. For more information, contact Belinda Seppings: [email protected].

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