Barrio Escalante, San José

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Musa, by Alma Fernández Tercero. The frayed edge of torn paper establishes the visual logic of this work.

Alma Fernández Tercero

MusaInquire about availability

Year
2017
Technique
Mixed Media on Paper
Dimensions
31 × 23 cm
Status
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Palette
teal, forest green, light flesh, turquoise, brick red
Brushwork
Torn paper collage combined with pastel or graphite drawing in blended strokes and hyperrealistic botanical details.

Curatorial analysis

The frayed edge of torn paper establishes the visual logic of this work. Rather than simply depicting a female countenance enveloped by nature, it constructs a stratified anatomy where skin, vegetation, and diverse papers are exposed through deliberate fractures. The fibrous, white borders of the manual tears function as open scars, bridging overlapping strata of reality.

At the center, the face commands an absolute frontality and a nearly statuesque composure. Its gentle modeling, achieved through delicate tonal gradations across the skin and a steady gaze of steely irises, contrasts sharply with the intricate texture occupying the upper register: a dense botanical expanse of ferns and leaves that appears to emerge straight from the crown via cracks resembling roots or flashes of lightning. The intimate scale of the surface, barely thirty-one centimeters in height, compresses this lush foliage, turning the greenery into an expansive mass barely restrained by the image frame.

Toward the chest, a second tear reveals a visceral cavity. Rather than flesh, this opening discloses a reddish, gridded ground upon which rests a turquoise butterfly, akin to an entomological specimen preserved in the sternum. Below, a damask-patterned green paper grounds the base of the composition in a domestic, decorative register that tears apart to reveal further hidden worlds.

The piece presents a meditation on identity as an assemblage of veils and substrates. Far from functioning as a passive embodiment of womanhood fused with the landscape, the figure emerges as a permeable organism whose thoughts sprout like wild undergrowth and whose emotional core pulses as a captive lepidopteran within a botanical archive.

Musa

More works by Alma Fernández Tercero

30 works

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View all 30 works by Alma Fernández Tercero

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