SAN José’s Jacob Karpio Galería is presenting one of its largest international exhibits in several years, featuring the work of award-winning international artists Lydia Dona and Cinthya Soto, through Oct. 20.Dona, a Romanian-born artist residing in the United States, is appearing for her first time in Costa Rica in 10 years to display “Fuel Injection,” her continuing effort to express the “relationships with technology and the human body.”Soto, a Costa Rican-born painter who lives in Zurich, Switzerland, was chosen to represent Costa Rica in the Central American art competition Bienarte, and is currently displaying her collection of “photo spaces.”“JACOB’S international gallery has a lot to do with discussing and bringing a Latin American dialog to this type of (abstract) art,” Dona said. “He was the real motor that engineered a lot of this energy to bring us here.”Dona’s work was last featured in Costa Rica in 1995, with Karpio’s assistance, as part of an abstract art exhibit displayed in the National Museum of Art and Contemporary Design. The current exhibit is the largest she has had in the country to date.“Fuel Injection” is a large series in oil and acrylic paint, featuring canvases splashed with an abstract combination of organically colored paint mixed with concept designs of car motors. The idea is to pull the viewer into a labyrinth of urban environments, technology, lights and shadow, according to Dona.“I wanted to use technology to make it look organic and to deal with the question of the nervousness the environment is picking up,” she said. “I want a spectator to see this and be almost hypnotized – as if it is a scene in a movie.”Dona compares her technique of “overwhelming force and highly contrasting lights” to film noir, the motion picture genre made popular by directors Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and Howard Hawks in the 1940s and ’50s.SOTO, a graduate of Universidad Nacional (UNA), is presenting a new series along the same lines of her national award-winning series of “photo spaces” depicting various original settings throughout her home country.Among the places that act as settings for Soto’s work “A (des)tiempo” are the Central Market, a Caribbean coastal home and a fruit market.“I wanted to choose places that were more traditional, not like a mall,” she said. “These places didn’t necessarily have nice qualities, but they captured an aesthetic beauty that some people at first glance might say is ugly or old.”Soto, who pulls her artistic ability from her experience in video cinematography, photography and sculpture, often creates work that is a mixture of tangible objects fused with projected images. Her work has been displayed in galleries and museums in Switzerland, Spain, the United States, Ecuador, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Taiwan.The exhibit is free and open to the public Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, call Jacob Karpio Galería at 257-7963.
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