Barrio Escalante, San José

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Entre el Libro y el Viento, by Victor Huerta Batista. A diagonal axis fractures the scene: Pinocchio's wooden nose has transformed into a taut mast supporting an entire cosmogony upon its tip.

Victor Huerta Batista

Entre el Libro y el Viento

Technique
Acrylic/Canvas
Dimensions
118 × 88 cm
Status
Available
Palette
golden ochre, terracotta, leaden grey, cerulean blue, parchment
Brushwork
Brushstroke of precise drawing with thin glazes and dense impastos accentuating the tactile relief of the walls.

Curatorial analysis

A diagonal axis fractures the scene: Pinocchio's wooden nose has transformed into a taut mast supporting an entire cosmogony upon its tip. The mythological creature, an ancestral turtle carrying elephants and primeval land, resists the fierce gusts of anthropomorphic clouds blowing furiously from the upper right corner. That protrusion, which in the children's tale punished deceit, here acts as the structural support of a world in suspense, hung between the external squall and the puppet's own thirst.

Beneath this fantastic architecture, the character undergoes a crossroads of simultaneous gestures. With his open left hand he cradles the book narrating his own story, illuminated only by the flickering flame of a candle upon the table, while the diminutive figure of his conscience cowers inside his lapel collar. At the same time, his right arm raises a riveted metal watering can, industrial and almost machinic in design, pouring its stream directly into his parched throat. This visible articulation of joined parts, bolts, and spherical joints emphasizes the artificial condition of a body that nonetheless reveals a deeply organic anguish.

The acrylic constructs this space through a rigorous play of textures. The roughness of the brick wall behind, rendered in ochres and toasted earths with thick impastos, contrasts with the volumetric softness of the varnished flesh tones and the leaden gray of the atmospheric masses. Light stems from opposing sources: the intimate, warm glimmer of the low candle confronts the cold, ethereal clarity emanating from the upper quadrant. By weaving Collodi's fable with archaic cosmogonic allegories, the canvas puts forward a meditation on the burden of fiction, where falsehood no longer spawns guilt, but instead founds whole universes, demanding in return a perpetual tribute of water and breath.

Entre el Libro y el Viento

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