Barrio Escalante, San José

Visits by appointment only

Schedule a visit (opens the scheduler)
El capitalismo es antisocial, by Mario Rojas Kolomiets. An oppressive and ashen atmosphere dominates the stage, where spectral light falls not from a natural source, but with the scenographic coldness of an operating room or an interrogation chamber.

Mario Rojas Kolomiets

El capitalismo es antisocial

Year
2016
Technique
Oil/Canvas
Dimensions
130 × 89 cm
Status
Available
Palette
lead grey, brown, soft earth, rust orange, mustard yellow
Brushwork
Polished and academic brushwork with precise illusionistic modeling, soft sfumato in skies, and sharp textural contrasts in debris and flesh tones.

Curatorial analysis

An oppressive and ashen atmosphere dominates the stage, where spectral light falls not from a natural source, but with the scenographic coldness of an operating room or an interrogation chamber. Upon a cracked, fetid ground traversed by muddy runoffs and populated by crawling rats stands a disquieting collection of poles resembling modern pikes. Resting upon them, severed and frozen in mournful inertia, are the hyperrealistic heads of key political figures from the twentieth century, ranging from military headgear to the unmistakable beard of Fidel Castro.

The composition establishes a severe counterpoint between the rigid verticality of these human totems and the chaotic mass of debris piled on the right. In the midst of this ideological ruin emerges a cadaverous Mickey Mouse, transformed into a sinister entity with sunken pupils, wielding a firearm and a syringe filled with phosphorescent fluid. The quintessential icon of mass culture ceases to be an innocent emblem of entertainment, becoming instead the executioner or sentinel of a residual nightmare, backed by a pyre of corroded commercial packaging, tires, and an ancestral totem degraded into a scrap pedestal.

The oil painting's surface is distinguished by its meticulous, near-photographic finish across the flesh tones and the organic decay of the supports, which evoke decomposing meat, rotting wood, and rusted metal. This descriptive virtuosity does not seek to comfort, but rather to emphasize the harshness of a scene where opposing doctrines, utopias, and narratives of emancipation or consumption are ultimately equated with biological and industrial waste. The canvas places the viewer in a political purgatory stripped of epic grandeur, where the immense antagonisms of power are reduced to inert relics within a global dumping ground.

El capitalismo es antisocial

More works by Mario Rojas Kolomiets

10 works

Available works

Inquire about availability

Similar works

By subject, palette and style

Message the gallery on WhatsApp

Cookies

We use cookies to learn how the site is used and to show the gallery's ads on other platforms. They are only turned on if you accept them.