A threshold (umbral) is a limit, an entrance, a gap, a beginning. There are thresholds of time, of space, of bodies, of imaginations. For Luciano Goizueta Fevrier (San José, 1982), thresholds are also reflections from memory and the possibilities of relationship between the malleability of time and its perception. For his first solo exhibition at La Galería Rebelde, the artist worked for two years on different series that express approaches to the concept of threshold from three starting points: the threshold of time, the threshold of space, and the threshold of vision, which is created as a game of multiple layers of illusion.

It is also a way of rethinking his artistic career and revisiting the spaces where the works for this exhibition were created. Memory is present in the paintings titled “UMBRAL I, II and III”, as they capture each of the studies as infinite spaces that extend far from reality. The paintings immerse themselves as a loop of memories and an expression of the thousands of stories of creation that happened in each space. Each studio has been important to think about his besieged production, that is, how each place impacts the color palette, the dimension of the work, the light that is reflected in them, exploring the relationship of time as if it were a tunnel and the image as an infinity of creation. Just as sound produces an extended echo, each juxtaposed plane is an echo of itself and an expansion of the possibilities of the image that resonate in a self-referential way in the representation of the studio, the works that were created for the exhibition, and the show where they are presented, as a triad of meanings and logics that play with the idea of ​​representation and reality.

From a conceptual approach, Luciano treats the painting as a character, portraying small hidden details that reveal connections with other series of his works, intimate moments of his daily life, and elements that play with the threshold of fiction and reality. In the second series entitled “Another Here, Another Now”, there is a game of color gradient that begins with the yellow of a painting to be painted and ends in a deep black night in a neighborhood in Costa Rica. In this series, the artist plays with the threshold of space and also places visual games that function as a meta-painting that connects with other series, other works, his present and past studios and above all the paintings for this exhibition. The semantic game is the eternal spiral in which the painting immerses us, questioning what is real and what is part of an inside joke or a charm that the artist has wanted to share as a small gesture. The paintings in this series are titled with the distance that exists between the place portrayed and the artist’s studio, making us think of them as a map of his life, a diary of postcards that have remained in his imagination and a way of sharing the memories that have been important to him. Some of these places take us to Costa Rica, Los Angeles, Guatemala, Colombia and Switzerland; and these are journeys that have been key to thinking about the series, the exhibition and the new direction of his artistic career.

“UMBRAL” is a tribute to the artist’s career explained from the spaces that have conceived each image. It is a personal review of his relationship with the context and the way in which the images happen in front of him. The landscape is important as an excuse to think about the moment, because every space is visited in a time and is inhabited by the body while time lengthens, stretches or shrinks. This is how the drawings titled “UMBRAL DEL TIEMPO” are created, from the observation of a window in his current studio where the changes in light that occur during a day are portrayed. These changes are clearer in the video that accompanies the gradient, and they reflect on how the visuality of the places we inhabit changes as time passes and the bodies that visit it.

Finally, this exhibition marks a turning point in the artist's career due to the ambitious scale of its work and the introspection that comes with reviewing more than a decade of production and lives that are multiplied and shrunk by each minute that one has before a change or a demolition. Luciano invites us to enter a labyrinth of images and all that remains for us to do is to free our bodies and explore the landscape that he proposes to us before it disappears.

-Josseline Pinto, Curator

Photography: José Oquendo