The artists Carmen Borrasé and Marcia Madrigal Guardia position themselves as the female gaze of the new group of figurative painters “El Grupo”, made up of consolidated artists with a long career such as Rolando Cubero, Miguel Hernández, Mario René Madrigal-Arcia, and the most talented recent Philip Anaskin and Roberto Murillo.
Both Carmen Borrasé and Marcia Madrigal, exponents of figurative art, highlight in their work surreal evocations that they have been working on throughout their careers and have recently shown in large-scale individual projects, such as Carmen’s exhibition “Metáfora, Símbolo y Allegory” at the Museum of Costa Rican Art and Marcia’s “El tiempo suspendido” at the Calderón Guardia Museum, both last year.
Relationships and human situations
Carmen Borrasé deals in her work with themes about various relationships and human situations, through detailed oil paintings, mixing elements and the title of the painting to achieve meanings to be interpreted by the public of her work. It indicates express objectives for involving the observer so that they can create their own translation of the work giving it an individual meaning.
She has painted professionally since the 1980s, with multiple exhibitions in the United States, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Received the Aquileo J. Echeverría National Award in 2001 and her work is represented in public and private collections in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, the United States, Panama, Mexico, the Netherlands and Spain.
“The artist uses everyday language in her works, but tries to give it a new meaning, with various metaphorical resources and through the use of oil paint as a means of expression” mentions the historian María Enriqueta Guardia.
Loneliness and existentialism
For her part, Marcia Madrigal Guardia is known for her painting work addressing themes related to loneliness and existentialism. She studied at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Costa Rica and at the Pro-Design School in Caracas, Venezuela.
She has exhibited at the Cultural Institute of Mexico, at the San Ramón Museum, the Municipal Museum of Cartago, among other cultural spaces. “Her pictorial work, delicate and intimate, explores great universal themes from the border between philosophy and metaphysics. Her singular and apparently enigmatic plastic vocabulary carries with it a complex symbolic register that translates life experience and the human condition. The agitation of the unconscious, the existential confusion, the loss, the flight, the permanence. The immaterial and the ephemeral are combined with the tangible and the precise in images that function as echoes of the same revelation”, mentions Sofía Soto Maffioli, former director of the Museum of Costa Rican Art.
Great emotional ties to art
Both artists reflect in their way of life, great emotional ties to art beyond their professional career, being part of family lineages dedicated to art. Carmen Borrasé for her grandfather, the teacher Tomás Povedano, founder and director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Costa Rica in 1897 and Marcia Madrigal Guardia for her parents, the renowned art historian María Enriqueta Guardia and the political scientist Rodrigo Madrigal Montealegre.
After the success of their recent exhibition “Synergias” at the Costa Rican Cultural Center, “El Grupo” is currently exhibiting the exhibition “Convergencias” in the art gallery of the Supreme Court of Justice, where they meet in order to show the diversity of approaches to figurative art dialoguing through the convergences found on the route that, as creators, they have been tracing through time, each one with their individual aesthetic languages. As a group, they make an ode to color, light and shape, and express internal searches through it. The exhibition can be visited from February 6th to 25th, from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m., regular hours of the Judiciary.
More about the other artists that are members of “El Grupo”
Rolando Cubero was born in Costa Rica in 1957. He began painting in 1975. Since then he has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Spain, Germany and Israel.
His eminently figurative work obeys magical, surreal or allegorical themes treated with refined realism. Among his awards are: Poster Award from the Museum of Costa Rican Art 1986, First International Prize in Modern Figurative Painting from the Miami Association of Art Critics and Commentators, USA 1987, Aquileo Echeverría National Painting Award, 2000. His works are in private and public collections in Costa Rica, the United States, Latin America, Israel and Europe.
Miguel Hernández has a degree in Plastic Arts with a specialty in drawing from the National University and a Master’s degree in Plastic Arts from the Pratt lnstitute in New York. He is currently a drawing professor at the School of Art and Visual Communication of the National University.
He has been awarded several awards and recognitions, among them: National Drawing Award, Aquileo J. Echeverria, and the Gold Medal of the Tomas Povedano Drawing Room, Áncora Award, both as members of the Bocaracá Group. Exhibited at the old Sofia lmber Museum in Caracas, at the Museum of Modern Art in Panama, MOCHA Museum in New York, MURA Museum of Japan, the Center for Latin American Studies at Ankara University in Turkey, among others. During his season in New York, he exhibited at the Menique Godlstrom Gallery and the Leonara Vega Gallery, both in Manhattan.
He represented Costa Rica at the XLVII International Art Biennial in Venice, Italy, and at the IV Art Biennial in Havana, Cuba. His work is part of important private art collections in Latin America and the United States, as well as public institutions, among others that are: The Museum of Costa Rican Art, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of Costa Rica, among others.
Mario René Madrigal-Arcia studied at the School of Fine Arts of Nicaragua, at the School of Plastic Arts of the National University and at the College of Plastic Arts of the Autonomous University of Central America. He develops his personal work through pen drawing, painting and engraving, having as a plastic pretext the theme of fruit or still lifes immersed in the landscape, giving it a more contemporary connotation.
He has multiple exhibitions in Peru, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Spain, Italy, Portugal and China. In 1993 he obtained second place in the “Spring international Competition and Exhibition” of The Florida Society of Fine Arts. Distinguished art critics such as Carol Damián (USA), Joan Lluís Montané (Spain). Dermis Pérez León (Cuba) and Dolores Torres (Nicaragua) among others, have written about his work. His work has been published in magazines such as Latin American Art Magazine (USA), Hypnose & Thérapies brevés (France) and in books such as 100 Years of the National Theater of Costa Rica, Art Gallery of the Central Bank of Nicaragua. The Fine Art Index (a compendium of contemporary art and artists, USA) and Un Dolmen para Dalí (Spain).
Phillip Anaskin was born in Russia in 1988. He has a Bachelor of Art and Visual Communication with a Specialty in Painting from the National University. Master in Human Rights and Education for Peace. He has studies in mural techniques, drawing and painting at the San Tikhon University in Moscow-Russia with a scholarship from UNA in 2013. Internship at URGS Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2014.
He currently works in painting in his workshop in Santa Bárbara de Heredia in Costa Rica from an introspective and retrospective vision of the personal experience of his family’s migration. He is a professor of Art and Visual Communication at UNA. Awarded with prizes and recognitions, among them: UNA Awards, for artistic performance in 2011, 1st Place in ValoArte in 2014. Has developed Murals at the Museum of Popular Culture of Costa Rica, at the National University, at Power Bank of Panama, and has exhibited his work in Costa Rica as well as in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and Russia.
Roberto Murillo has academic studies with a degree in Classical Drawing at the Atelier del Sol in San José, Costa Rica, of which he was deputy director in 2016, his proposal mixes the academy with the self-taught condition and his own research. It moves in a dark universe where the human being is represented in his most real and vulnerable condition, always under constant psychic pressure. Science and technology, as constructors of reality, are gradually disappearing human forms, placing artificial universes alien to the body itself, where everything seems to remain on an abstract plane of functional utility.
In the artist’s imagination, the world has left behind morality and religion, old ideologies, systems and institutions have fallen. The individual has few possibilities left to function as an anchor with the idea of existence and identity, where body and mind survive in an environment of emotional exhaustion. Contemporary issues such as depression, illness, anxiety, loneliness, fear, are represented in the artist’s work, who meditates on the impact that modern life has on human beings and the little capacity they have left to find some meaning that allow us to stay afloat.
