Isaac Loría
Psychologically fertile landscapes emerge in the work of painter Isaac Loría, who gathers inspiration during early morning walks around Herradura, an area of beach-adjacent farmland on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. His gestural paintings have a forthright immediacy, expressively capturing the beautiful but harsh environment, where high temperatures and humidity often become extreme by midday. Self-taught, yet fully versed in Velázquez and other classical masters, Loría brings an extensive art historical awareness to his remote and rustic environment, often painting outdoors amidst mango and banana trees, tacking his unstretched canvases to humble structures on his grandfather’s farm. Loría is a “painter’s painter,” an artist painting in order to investigate his reality, his memory, and his life, but who fundamentally employs paint as a material and a reality unto itself.
Loría’s work has been exhibited at el Museo de Arte Costarricense, San José, Costa Rica and was featured in Seguimos: Contemporary Art in Costa Rica at Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica in 2024.
“I can still remember the smell of the paint from the first tube of oil paint I ever held, a yellow oxide from the Acrilex brand, the little ones. Something about the smell of that paint made me feel like there was something different about this new material. It wasn't the same as the children's watercolors I had used before. I was 8 years old, but some time before that, I had already shown a great interest and sensitivity for painting.”
—Isaac Loría
“Although painting is commonly done on a flat surface, it occupies a place in time and space in a three-dimensional way. Therefore, painting is a body with unique qualities that relate to the environment rather than an image that resides in the mind. Painting is not a representation of the world either, whether that of dreams or waking life. Painting is only a representation of itself, and it is to this that it must remain faithful, not to photography, nor to what our eyes see outside of it.”
—Isaac Loría
Featured Works
