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Orestes Larios or "The Hopeful Purity"
by Jesús David Curbelo

 

Contemplation is that superior state of the spirit, to which we have been convened while we pace Orestes Larios' (Camagüey, Cuba 1953) canvases. The ecologist, like landscapes, invites us to go into ecstasies in fragments almost photographs of an insular atmosphere where trees, herbs, flowers, animals, lagoons and the sky-blue clearness of the space simulate the kindness of the equilibrium. But be careful; the artist insists on breaking it, not in a gratuitous way, by using two focalizations.

One is diffused, in which nature shows its majestic quietness. The another is, precise and intimate, and reminds us that the world is also, "A slow association and a wonderful concentration." It is a restless and creating work as that of those obsessive bees that live in the paintings.

Both realities (the public and the private, the objective and the subjective, the molecule and the atom) at the time comply with an idealized universe where the artist wishes us sheltered by civilizations and technologies; by hatreds and fleeting powers; retaking the pantheistic idea that god is also stone, water, leaves, wood and, above all, a loving dialogue with the infinite.

His two basic colors, white and green, become a strong judgement that Larios proposes to us. It's a hope of salvation through purity, through assuming that too many opposing pairs such as painting and photography, equilibrium and rupture, rest and ebullition everything and nothing find their way into one.

One is watched and watches us from the flawlessness of his canvas.

"When the term "ecology" was not so popular as it is today in the field of politics, sciences, and arts Orestes Larios Zaak lived with the obsession for the relation of man-fauna, man-flora."

Dr. Pedro Martinez Acosta Madrid, Spain l997 .