Fotogramas (Frames), Set of 4 paintings, 2018

Jose Ricardo Contreras Gonzalez  

This oil painting presents a fragmented digital landscape. The composition functions as a series of disjointed screens. It challenges the viewer to reconsider how reality is mediated through technology. A feline figure floats within a green screen environment. This contrast highlights the artificiality of modern imaging. Adjacent panels explore geometric voids and intricate ornamental patterns. The narrative shifts toward the human form in the final segment. A reclining figure appears partially obscured by a green block. This strategic erasure references the process of digital editing and masking. The artist blends figurative tradition with contemporary glitches. He examines the tension between the physical body and the virtual record. Every element reflects on the mechanisms of representation. The artwork oscillates between the domestic and the abstract. It transforms a static surface into a study of flow and migration. The execution remains precise. The palette transitions from electric greens to deep, nocturnal shadows. The piece concludes with a detailed study of skin and fabric textiles.

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.

Overall size: 19.6 x 62.9 in
Individual size: 19.6 x 15.7 in
Mounted on a stretcher