Studio Visit | Guillermo Tovar Carazo
Guillermo's Costa Rican surrealist landscape painting
Last month we visited Guillermo Tovar Carazo at his studio in Escazú to catch up and to see what he is working on. He showed us books of sketches — pages of creatures, characters and landscapes that fuel the paintings — and several large canvases at various stages of completion, leaning up the walls.
Guillermo talked about the work with his usual vigour and enthusiasm. Seeing the paintings in progress felt like an insight into his mind — the backstory of narratives slowly materialising on canvas. The sketchbooks were full of drawings, inspiration for his Costa Rican surrealist landscape painting — creatures, characters, forest scenes. He told us that drawing is his first language, something he can do anywhere, at any time. It's always clear to us that Guillermo needs to draw — to get his characters on paper and keep the imagination moving.
Guillermo is inspired by the spiritual and the natural world — the forests, coastlines and ecosystems of the country — and the fantastical elements he introduces are layered into the trees, the roots, the understorey.
Twisted trunks, dense bark and tangled root systems anchor the compositions, while Costa Rican spirit creatures peer from the foliage, perch on roots by the water's edge, and weep tears that turn into gemstones cascading down the sand. Sometimes, between the trees, black portals open — vast, dense thresholds into another dimension, into something beyond the visible forest. In one canvas, a river tumbles over rocks populated by robotic figures, sketched and energetic.
The voids and portals Guillermo paints become recognisable in Costa Rica's rainforests. The dark recesses, the places where light doesn't reach and the forest floor disappears into blackness. Guillermo makes these spaces visible and gives them a spiritual weight. His paintings change the way you look at the Costa Rican landscape; when we walk our beach in Playas del Coco or venture into the cloud forest in Barva, we see these shapes as thresholds into Costa Rica's spiritual dimension.
This vision has been years in the making. Influenced by his childhood fascination with 1980s fantasy cinema — Gremlins, Ghostbusters — alongside a long engagement with esoteric and hermetic traditions, Guillermo has developed a unique way of interpreting the world around him.
His work has been shown internationally at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, the Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art and La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and extensively across Costa Rica. His most recent exhibition, faerie, ran at Sendero Hotel in Nosara through deCERCA gallery and marked the end of that space's Guanacaste programme. Collectors we have shown his work to have responded strongly to his Costa Rican surrealist landscape painting.
Guillermo also paints landscapes that appear more traditional, a subtler entry point into his world. Beach scenes with dappled light and twisted roots look at first like a simple landscape, but the surreal begins to surface — rock formations that bulge and undulate, tree roots that seem to move. The large-scale canvases in progress at the studio push this further. Here the fantastical is fully present and the sheer scale amplifies everything.
Diamond House by the Lake (header image) is a smaller, more intimate work — a crystalline structure at the edge of a garden pond, refracting light against a lush green background. It is luminous and precise, and feels like a glimpse into an imaginary world that extends beyond the edges of the canvas. Available through MÍRAME, Diamond House by the Lake is a good introduction into Guillermo's practice.
The large-scale canvases we saw in progress in Guillermo's studio are the next chapter in his Costa Rican surrealist landscape painting — fresh work coming off a strong start to the year, and we are excited to see them finished. The creatures are taking shape and the worlds are forming — we will be sharing them with collectors as soon as they are ready. Guillermo is an artist on the rise, and we are proud to represent him.
Guillermo can also take on a commissions to create your own unique spirit painting — whether you have a specific stretch of Costa Rica in mind, a forest scene, or a creature of your own imagining. Get in touch and we can talk through what's possible.
To enquire, contact Belinda at [email protected].
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