Federico Herrero

This presentation brings together one of Federico Herrero’s large-scale works on canvas with smaller paintings on paper to explore the ways in which the artist uses an expansive and deeply personal concept of landscape to create a language of form and color grounded in the poetics of place.

For Herrero, painting is activated by our physical experience of it and intrinsically connected to our perception of time and space. He is interested in absorbing the ways in which painting appears in the world around us, from urban spaces to the lush tropical forests of his native Costa Rica. This visual information is synthesized into abstracted compositions that seem to vibrate with an internal rhythm.

“Etel Adnan speaks of the landscape as poetry. For me, there is a sense of that in my work. Even if the forms are not building up into a horizon, I still see a landscape in them. I spent so much time at home over the past two years, and I was looking a lot at the nature that surrounded it. Before, I was traveling a lot to cities, so the floating forms in my paintings related to this feeling of living on the move. But I have begun turning inwards, building up a relationship to my home and its surroundings, which for me is a work that is constantly evolving. It has its own timing, colors and forms are changing all the time.” ¹

Herrero’s intimately scaled acrylic and watercolor paintings on paper— a new medium for the artist—create a rich, distilled vocabulary that reveals the sensory and pictorial properties of Herrero’s image-making. These works reflect Herrero’s recent immersion in the rural environment of Península de Nicayo, where he has built a home and studio away from the bustle of San José.

The overlapping shapes that shift and settle against one within the compositions are juxtaposed with and contained by passages of painted-out space, suggesting moments of pause and stillness within a compositional structure defined by movement. Herrero’s incorporation of watercolor into these works creates transparencies that contain echoes of early brushstrokes, reverberating notes rendered in paint.

“We only have two seasons here, the dry and the rainy. The plants go up and then they go down a bit and then up again, which is kind of like breathing. That aspect of a landscape that translates into certain vibrations and temporalities has a beauty that I like a lot. This feeling of a place, of a natural circle that stands still and is still moving and growing, has started to feed the work very directly.”  ⁴

Watch Federico Herrero discuss the open-ended relationship he’s built between the world and his studio in this short documentary film.

¹ ¯ ⁴ “An Interview with Federico Herrero,” interview by Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, (May 2021). https://www.sieshoeke.com/exhibitions/federico-herrero-night-blue-sies-hoeke-2021.