Barrio Escalante, San José

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En las Alturas, by Carlos Tapia. The domestic space bends and expands in this scene as if responding to an invisible centrifugal force.
1 photo · 1 video

Carlos Tapia

En las Alturas

Year
2010
Technique
Giclée
Dimensions
47 × 60 cm
Status
Available
Palette
vermilion red, warm yellow, emerald green, violet, ivory white
Brushwork
Sharp, black contour lines defining uniform, luminous fields of flat color with smooth gradations.

Curatorial analysis

The domestic space bends and expands in this scene as if responding to an invisible centrifugal force. An elastic, dizzying perspective shatters conventional architecture: walls fan out, furniture leans at improbable diagonals, and the checkerboard floor rushes toward an open doorway that frames an infinite play of reflections. The room, rather than an inert container, behaves like a flexible organism defying gravity and everyday stability.

Three felines with turquoise gazes act as the true masters of this bewilderment. Two of them lounge and drape with supple ease atop a curved chest of drawers that defies its own weight, while a third crosses the threshold with feline caution. Their presence provides a vital counterpoint to the furniture's rigidity; they are comfortable witnesses to a space that seems to reconfigure itself around them. On the right, a tipped vase thrusts enormous white calla lilies and yellow-veined leaves into the foreground, granting nature a theatrical monumentality against the interior's artifice.

Color operates here with boundless intensity, bound by a firm, graphic black line that contains the saturation before it overflows. Fields of pure red, radiant bands of yellow and orange, and purple arabesques collide without collapsing into chaos, articulated by a rigorous sense of visual rhythm. Light does not emanate from a window or a lamp, but from the vibration of adjacent pigments themselves.

Between botanical exuberance and malleable architecture, the scene offers a playful immersion into an altered intimacy. The viewer remains suspended at an impossible overhead angle, participating in a private sanctuary where physical laws have been replaced by the whim of instinct and chromatic reverie.

En las Alturas

More works by Carlos Tapia

153 works

Available works

View all 153 works by Carlos Tapia
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