Barrio Escalante, San José

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Blanca Pastora, by Ramón Chirinos. An almost spectral whiteness dominates the large-format surface, dismantling classical devotional iconography to transport it into contemporary visual territory.

Ramón Chirinos

Blanca Pastora

Year
2010
Technique
Mixed Media
Dimensions
150 × 150 cm
Status
Available
Palette
chalk white, charcoal black, lead gray, grayish lavender, soft ochre
Brushwork
Layering of dense impastos, fluid drips, geometric stencils, and glazes over a figurative base.

Curatorial analysis

An almost spectral whiteness dominates the large-format surface, dismantling classical devotional iconography to transport it into contemporary visual territory. At the center, the Marian figure and child emerge with porcelain-like serenity, carved in pale tones and downcast gazes that contrast immediately with the gestural turbulence surrounding them. A slender, definitive black crook crosses the scene in a strict diagonal, anchoring the composition's human axis against the material dispersion of the environment.

The space is organized through a continuous layering of registers. Behind the hatted head, a circular halo adorned with geometric tracery dialogues with flat gray horizontal bands, as if the scene alternated between an ecclesiastical altarpiece and an urban wall. This graphic tension intensifies with the word "PASTORA", stenciled on the right with the detachment of an industrial template, and with the grids of vertical bars floating across the lower third like visual code or a decomposed lattice. On the left, a vase laden with thick white and violet impasto balances the visual weight, functioning simultaneously as an offering and a chromatic anchor.

In the lower register, the pictorial matter abandons all strict contours: dense whites surrender to drips, pigment is scraped down, and heavy masses of asphalt black threaten to dissolve the neatness of the drapery. Warm glints appear, small bursts of yellow and ochre that surge from the background like an internal vibration of light. Chirinos strips the pastoral theme of its naive candor, transforming reverence into an exercise where the purity of white defends itself from, and simultaneously feeds upon, the density of graphite, dripping paint, and the fracturing of space.

Blanca Pastora

More works by Ramón Chirinos

34 works

Available works

View all 34 works by Ramón Chirinos

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