Milo Gonzalez and the Latin American Still Life Painting Tradition
Still Life, 2026, was shown as part of A Través del Tiempo (Through Time) at the Galería Siegfried Schosinsky at the Banco de Costa Rica in San José earlier this year — a survey of sixteen of Milo Gonzalez paintings that presented the full range of his practice. When we visited the exhibition, this was my favourite painting in the show. It is now available through MÍRAME.
Still Life, 2026, Oil on canvas, 92 x 127 cm | 36.2 x 50 in. USD 4,800
It looks at first like a traditional still life, as the title suggests — four bottles on a green surface, set against an abstracted background of bruised purples, ochres and flashes of red — but what Gonzalez is really working through is presence: the relationships between forms that occupy the same space, and how colour, used structurally, helps to construct the composition.
What really strikes me about this painting is how much psychological space Gonzalez creates within what is, technically, a domestic subject. The bottles are the kind of objects you might find on any kitchen shelf in Moravia or Guanacaste — but the way they are arranged, the shadows that connect them and the light that separates them, gives the composition a quality closer to portraiture than still life in the conventional sense.
You might think of objects in a still life being placed for compositional effect, yet here they look found, as if Gonzalez came across them in that configuration and simply started painting. The more you look, the more the bottles come to feel less like objects than like figures caught in a moment of coexistence.
Gonzalez describes the work in characteristically direct terms: "I made this painting thinking of the relations of bodies in a given space — thus, it's a compositional exercise: a play between concrete forms and abstract fore and background, contrasted and underlined by colour." That tension between the concrete and the abstract is where his practice has always thrived.
Gonzalez was born in Moravia, north of San José, in 1956, and came to painting late — discovering it in his twenties and developing his practice largely without formal academic training, guided in part by Kan Yu Chen at La Escuela Casa del Artista. He has described his process as one of surrender: "The colours present themselves; they are not planned. They flow through me."
Looking at his work, you believe him — the surfaces have an openness to them, a confidence that comes through in everything from the bull paintings to a Costa Rican still life painting like this one.
Milo Gonzalez, Bodegon Rustico, 2023
Still Life is the most recent in a sustained body of still life work; Bodegón Rústico, 2023, also available through MÍRAME, shows the same domestic subject matter — kitchen vessels, fruit, the everyday objects of Costa Rican life. We have long admired Gonzalez's work and in particular his pieces from the Latin American still life painting tradition; we have not come across a painter like him in Costa Rica.
Milo Gonzalez and the Latin American Still Life Painting Tradition
The Latin American still life painting tradition has a long history. The bodegón — the kitchen still life depicting everyday objects, local earthenware and food — emerged during the colonial period as painters began turning away from purely religious and political commissions towards the material world around them.
That tradition persisted and evolved through the twentieth century: Diego Rivera painted still lifes early in his career in direct dialogue with French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, and the genre has remained a consistent thread in the region's painting, explored in depth in the survey exhibition Reflections of Time and Place: Latin American Still Life in the 20th Century at El Museo del Barrio in New York. What connects the tradition across centuries is the use of ordinary, local objects as the starting point for something more searching — which is precisely what Gonzalez is doing here.
The influence of modern masters is also evident in Gonzalez's work — Gauguin and Picasso in particular, in the Cubist fragmentation of form and the use of colour as structure. But the palette situates him firmly within a Latin American still life painting tradition: earthy ochres, deep reds, the warm browns of pre-Columbian ceramics. His bull paintings — among his most recognised works — are informed by that same symbolic register, the bull as a figure of force and cultural memory in the Central American imagination. The still lifes operate differently, more intimate in scale and subject, but the same confidence with colour runs through both.
At 92 x 127 cm | 36.2 x 50 inches, Still Life is a substantial canvas that would anchor a wall. The intimacy of the subject alongside the warmth of the palette means it would sit well in a living space.
Still Life is available now. We would love to place it with the right collector. We are happy to arrange a viewing, share additional images, or provide condition details on request. [email protected]
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