La Lectura (The reading), 2025

Jose Ricardo Contreras Gonzalez  

A cinematic triptych unfolds through a series of oil paintings. The narrative flows with a quiet, rhythmic tension. In the first panel, a close-up captures a woman in a moment of deep introspection. Her eyes are closed. Her expression is serene yet heavy with thought.
The scene expands in the center. We enter a sterile office environment. The woman, dressed in a blue uniform, stands poised while reading a small slip of paper. Behind her, a male figure sits at a desk, absorbed in his own task. The composition emphasizes the distance between the two individuals. Light falls sharply across the white walls and red wooden furniture. A green filing cabinet anchors the space with a muted, industrial tone.
The final panel shifts toward absence. The room remains, but the human figures have vanished. Only the architecture and the furniture persist in the dim light. This sequence explores the intersection of memory and everyday life. It transforms a mundane setting into a psychological landscape. The artist employs a refined figurative style to examine the mechanisms of representation and the flow of time. Every brushstroke reinforces a sense of stillness and solitude. The artwork concludes with the stark emptiness of a deserted desk.

While "Composition for Film" evokes notable associations with masters of painting and poetry known precisely for their ability to evoke slow time, intimacy, poetry, and introversion (Hopper, de Chririco, Dickinson), there is also the connection to open space, to light, which is an elemental sign of exteriority, of belonging to the cosmos, and very important for Jose Ricardo Contreras's work are the equipment and props that allow photography and film to capture these sensations.
All this intensity is enlivened by "Change of Light," which, without betraying the central theme, summons a banal but extremely useful activity of generating light, even if domestic, all poetry worn out by the vicissitudes of subsistence. elemental, but lightened by a sense of humor."

This series of pieces is the result of an investigation into the use of light as a tool for the representation of reality and image creation. Starting in the 40s, the work of the artist Edward Hopper took significant recognition that led to becoming a benchmark for cinematographers in everyone, especially because of their relationship in film noir and the influence exercised by the painter in the work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wender. Hopper was inspired by the cinema to create his paintings and the cinema became inspired by Hopper.
The images that the series represents were taken from the film and behind the scenes of the film "Shirley Vision of Reality" by 2013 by the Austrian director Gustav Deutsch, in an exercise that I seek to literally recreate a series of paintings by Hopper and with they narrate the story of three decades beginning in North America from the 30s and going until the 60s. The scenes depicted in the film are interior images inhabited by solitary people, who relate to the outside through the entrances of light and sound, images that. They speak of a world that was, but resembles the intermittent state of simulation and quarantine of the contemporary world.

Mounted on a stretcher