Eruptions in the landscape: identity, roots, and fantasy in Mario madrigal’s painting

The nature reflected in a work of art is not always its faithful copy, but the reflection of the artist’s feelings or the search for new ways of expression. Mario Rene Madrigal-Arcia (1957) has been painting landscapes since 1980 and became renowned in the 90s with his FRUIT-OBJECT series in which he evokes the monumentality and grandeur of the Nicaraguan landscape transformed by his fantasies.

If until 1996 the fruit were portrayed as a continuation of the landscape and fused with the natural surroundings, progressively they have given way to a human presence, absent in his earlier works. The new presence of women is highly evocative and significant since it is through them that Madrigal-Arcia expresses a cult to fertility and establishes a suggestive relationship between woman, landscape and fruit. Women nudes still as statues, facing us or showing their backs, their faces or knees cut off by the edge of the canvas, sometimes seated, sometimes reclined. They do not represent the eternal ideal of beauty associated with occidental art. Instead, they are a continuation of the exuberant landscape that surrounds us, in which the human body turns into valleys and slopes forming a unique panorama through the symbiosis generated between woman, landscape and fruit.

However, in Madrigal-Arcia’s art the subversive character of surrealist esthetics is dominant. His figuration is based on non-plausible juxtapositions of giant fruit and fruit-like nudes, erupting volcanoes paralyzed as if frozen, empty mysterious boats, and intense green islets with a fantastic and surrealistic character which is emphasized by an unreal and subjective palette.

Through these nudes and a whole series of displaced objects, Madrigal-Arcia –like Rene Magritte- is able to trigger poetic effects in everyday surroundings creating scenes of an unsettling ambiguity through the use of heterogeneous elements that convey a symbolic meaning. Fruit, petrified nudes with faces that are always covered, dogs and blue horses, empty couches, erupting volcanoes, all these accentuate the evocative and poetic character of his paintings and compel the viewer to look and interpret the work in a different way.

In Madrigal-Arcia’s work, the veracity of traditional figurative painting disappears to give way to a series of different realities and associations lacking any logic through the almost obsessive repetition of images and objects out of context, such as the red couches, the giant coffee grains, enormous avocados and guanabanas, where the clash of images invites us to discover a different universe and a new beauty. At the same time, his apocalyptic sunsets and the stillness of his human figures with their faces always covered under the folds of a piece of cloth, accentuate and emphasize that ambiguous and mysterious atmosphere that impregnates  his paintings.

In his manipulation of reality, our artist rejects traditional colors – sky blue, moss green – to replace them with vibrating and contrasting colors: purple and violet hues, bright reds, oranges, cobalt and prussian blues; colors that in their pure forms are not found in nature. This arbitrary way of using color, specially in the treatment of nudes as well as animals – dogs and horses – results in a liberation from naturalistic references, its unsettling audacity causing an impact on the viewer.

Through all these works – be it oil or acrylic painting on canvas or etchings – Mario Rene Madrigal-Arcia has shown his great capacity to artistically play with reality and has known how to select what is more representative of the Nicaraguan landscape in a search to reaffirm his identity and roots through a fantastic and “de-realizing” esthetic.