ELVIRA RICO GRILLO: CONTEMPORARY DRAWING AND FANTASTICAL COMPOSITIONS
Elvira Rico Grillo’s artwork is a masterclass in merging the boundaries between drawing and painting. As an artist grounded in naked humanity, she uses the naked body as a powerful symbol, freely interweaving dense symbolic imagery that excites and overturns the norm of composition. This use of the naked body is not merely for shock value but a deliberate choice to explore themes of vulnerability, self-reflection, and connection. Rico Grillo is a Colombian artist with an evident graphic style; he makes his work move and speak dynamic and vibrant.
She almost always painted the horses as her work’s focus: symbols of power, freedom, and beauty. It’s a trope that she often invokes, as much a throwback to the colorful horse culture of her family. Often intimately or symbolically enacted, the human body suggests self-reflection, frailty, and connection. These elements sit alongside abstract forms, such as circles and rough shapes. These abstract forms represent more universal notions: circles symbolize the cyclical nature of time, rough shapes evoke the instability and unpredictability of life, and both suggest the continuous evolution of the self and the world. She explores movement and rhythm in space with bodies, but it is not just a description. Rico Grillo’s paintings are full of geometric objects and artifacts that she uses to investigate the borders of form and space, of reality and imagination. The interplay she masters leads to a body of moving and meditative work.
Rico Grillo invites us to experience art as a narrative through her innovative use of line and color. She creates imagery and feeling – from the gawking horse to the ecstatic stillness of a human. The juxtaposition of precise, fine lines and intermittent, frantic colors reflects the tensions of daily existence and intrigues the viewer, pulling them into a reality-and-imagination world.
Through her observations, Rico Grillo brings a tactile understanding of body language, space, and atmosphere to her art. She takes inspiration from her surroundings—the light, the sounds, the breath of life—and translates them into layered, evocative compositions. Using drawing, oil washes, or both blended into mixed-media processes; her creations are an entryway into the dream state, where contemplation and emotional experience reside.
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