Barrio Escalante, San José

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Niños Pescando Verde, by Guillermo Conte. An incandescent wash of acid yellow and moss green nearly swallows the entire visible field.

Guillermo Conte

Niños Pescando VerdeInquire about availability

Year
2019
Technique
Oil/Canvas
Dimensions
176 × 159 cm
Status
Inquire about availability
Palette
mustard yellow, olive green, lime green, forest green, carbon black
Brushwork
Fluid glazes, oil washes, and fine calligraphic strokes on a gestural background worked with scraping.

Curatorial analysis

An incandescent wash of acid yellow and moss green nearly swallows the entire visible field. Within this saturated atmosphere, hovering between the density of a marshy pond and the reverberation of an almost blinding glare, five childish silhouettes emerge. Miniscule in scale relative to the monumental format of the canvas, the boys wear vintage suits and shorts, suspended in the patient act of fishing. Their rods, slender black filaments traced with a fine brush, attempt to probe a depth that defies being read merely as water or pure pigment.

The pictorial matter operates here through dissolution and glazing. The oil paint, thinned to an extreme liquidity that evokes India ink or watercolor, runs in drippings, transparencies, and darker sedimentations that anchor both the top and bottom of the canvas. In the center, beneath the fishermen's feet, lines of cursive handwriting hover without surrendering their message. This calligraphic script, reminiscent of private letters or forgotten notes, underscores the ghostly resonance of the scene: the children do not seem to inhabit a contemporary natural setting, but rather rise from a sediment of memory, like faded figures on the yellowed paper of a submerged archive.

A subtle rhythm governs the vertical arrangement of the figures, staggered along a broken axis that draws the gaze into the distance. The dark, sinuous reflections of their bodies on the liquid surface interrupt the chromatic uniformity, establishing a tension between the buoyancy of childhood play and the weight of a silent, engulfing atmosphere. The vibration of the color does not offer warmth, but rather a vegetal and oneiric uncanny, where the recollection of youth remains frozen on a threshold where nature and time dissolve into paint.

Niños Pescando Verde

More works by Guillermo Conte

32 works

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