Isaac Loría lives on his grandfather’s farm in Herradura, Costa Rica about four miles from the Pacific Ocean. He built his own modest home of plywood, cinder blocks and fallen cedar from the property. His studio, a much larger construction but equally rustic, is just a few steps away, surrounded by shady mango and guava trees that he planted.  His dogs Valpú and Paguar, wet from the tropical rain, saunter in and out of the studio while Isaac swishes and daubs several canvases in progress. 

He is self-taught, but keenly aware of art history with a thick, tattered and paint smeared Velasquez tome always nearby. A large unstretched canvas on the floor depicts two men in boxing gloves dueling in an empty and expansive landscape, recalling Goya’s Fight with Cudgels, a tragic allegory of two combatants locked in endless battle, both trapped knee-deep in a quagmire. For Loría, however, the struggle is symbolic of competing thoughts in his head, he even merged one of the figures into the background, asking who the fight is really against. 

His landscapes may equally be regarded as transcendental. Dark blue oceanscapes with resolute black rocks pummeled by white walls of waves are simply, “the end of the world.” Loría proclaims that “landscape painting is not nature itself…but the result of light being transported, synthesized inside and materialized through the body on a surface giving the impression of an existing location.” In this way, his work always has the essence of self-portraiture. His painting of himself as a young drummer boy recalls Manet’s The Fifer, an artist who taught countless artists what a painting could be. His landscapes of the Monteverde Cloud Forest and his family’s farmland are pastoral and idyllic, but they can occasionally verge on violent and disquieting. They sometimes include figures with knives behind their backs, or boats launching with a coffin on their deck, they are always suggestive rather than explicit. 

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About the Artist