Exhibition: Isaac Loría | Doblar El Viento
Paintings from the Pacific Coast
MÍRAME artist Isaac Loría opened his solo exhibition Doblar El Viento (Bend the Wind) at the Costa Rica Country Club in Escazú on 9 June, presenting a new body of landscape and figurative paintings. The exhibition includes large-format horse and landscape paintings, intimate figurative works and a series of small bird studies. It runs until 30 July.
Loría is from Herradura, north of Jacó, on Costa Rica's Pacific coast — largely self-taught, working outdoors among banana and mango trees, inspired by Old Masters like Velázquez and Degas. His practice is directly responsive to the atmospheric conditions of the Pacific coast, where the changes between dry and wet season transforms the landscape dramatically and the light changes hour by hour.
His work has been shown at the Museo de Arte Costarricense in San José and featured in Seguimos: Contemporary Art in Costa Rica at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica in 2024.
Isaac Loría, 12 Caballos, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 204 cm | 51.2 x 80.3 in.
It was our pleasure to speak with him about this new body of work.
Loría's paintings from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica come from distinct sources: landscape, imagination and personal memory. Several of his landscapes, horse or bird paintings, are painted from imagination, with Loría using his body as an extension of the gesture on canvas. For example, 12 Caballos is among the largest works in the show: a wide horizontal canvas with horses moving through an ochre and deep green Herradura landscape at dusk, two bare trees bisecting the composition. When we saw this painting in his studio, Loría told us that it was also inspired by this being the Chinese year of the horse — twelve horses for twelve months.
Las flores que extrañan el agua (the title translates romantically to The Flowers That Miss the Water) depicts a more tender composition of a wetland scene — standing water, bare-branched trees, the blues and yellows of the Central Pacific sky — painted with speed and immediacy, directly from nature.
Isaac Loría, Las flores que extrañan el agua, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 97cm | 35.4 x 38.2 in.
Two works in the show belong to the artist's own collection and are inspired by his family photograph album. La Furia del Volcán shows a pregnant figure set against a Costa Rican landscape, a small bird perched to her left. Aprender a Volar (title image) shows a young child, arms raised, mid-shout, painted in deep reds against a blue sky.
We asked Isaac about his general inspiration behind the works. "I draw a lot of inspiration from my family album from when I was a child," he told us. "La Furia del Volcán is from a picture of my mother when she was pregnant — I was inside. Aprender a Volar and El Sol en el Bolsillo — both pictures of me as a child. The landscapes are drawn from my imagination, and also the birds."
Isaac Loría, La Furia del Volcan, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 98 cm | 43.3 x 38.6 in.
The absent faces in the figurative works are a recurring feature of Loría's practice and a striking part of the exhibition.
Several figures — in El Sol en el Bolsillo, in Margaritas — are presented with faces obscured or left as flat planes of colour. We asked him about this directly. He told us: "I don't see painting in a linear trajectory — I prefer circles or spirals. I don't approach painting to bring a particular message or idea. I believe my work is to create pictures that put our imagination to work. When you take away a face from a portrait, you take away the particular judgement towards someone, and the body becomes a universal gesture."
He also mentioned that he had myopia until the age of eighteen and resisted wearing glasses: "I really had to learn to identify people by their body language rather than their faces. So sometimes when I paint someone I just feel it is ready without the facial features. For this particular show I wanted to create a universal character rather than a portrait of my mother or someone in particular."
Isaac Loría, Margaritas, acrylic on canvas
93 x 74 cm | 36.6 x 29 in.
We have been eagerly anticipating these new paintings. As an emerging talent producing paintings from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, Loría is an artist whose practice we follow closely and with great pleasure.
Works from Doblar El Viento are available through MÍRAME. The exhibition runs until 30 July at the Costa Rica Country Club, Escazú. Contact us to enquire or to receive a PDF catalogue.
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