Perfume de mi reina (Costa Rica)

The inverted weight of the angel's trumpet corollas dictates the painting's sense of gravity. Hanging like botanical bells in tones of peach, ivory, and salmon, these nocturnal blossoms cascade over a white expanse that refuses to close in. The artist allows the raw canvas ground to breathe, letting the plant matter descend with both the languor and violence typical of humid tropical flora. The foliage seeks neither the order of a herbarium nor the composure of a still life; it is a living mass of acid greens, ochres, and brownish shadows trickling downward through deliberate washes and drips.

At the base of this botanical condensation, an apparition emerges that disrupts any purely landscape reading. Veiled in glazes of an almost phosphorescent teal, a feline face (a jaguar or a mountain spirit) materializes amidst the streams of thinned pigment. Its blind or inward-turned eyes do not look outward; instead, they seem to ingest the emanations drifting down from the flowers above. The juxtaposition of the Brugmansia (a plant tied in the popular imagination to narcotic dreams, poison, and intoxicating nocturnal scent) with this spectral beast pulls the narrative into the realm of myth and transmutation.

The brushwork oscillates between dry rubbing and fluid trails, allowing the surface to preserve the memory of trickling paint and gestural speed. Toward the lateral edges and the lower third, the raw white of the canvas functions not as passive emptiness, but as a luminous atmosphere that isolates the apparition, turning the scene into a buoyant, floating experience. The painting thus operates as the capture of an invisible discharge: scent rendered as a dense territory where the plant and animal kingdoms meld into a shared, suspended vigil.