FABULOUS FRUIT PORTRAITS: ALONSA GUEVARA
ALONSA GUEVARA
Can fruit have personality? If you go with the definition of “distinctive character,” then definitely! The most beautiful fruits make quite an impression.
I have vivid memories of specific fruit encounters, like eating tiny sun-warmed strawberries grown in the rich black soils of Mount Vesuvius. They were handed to me in a paper cone as I stepped off the boat in Naples on my first trip to Italy. Intense flavor bombs burst on my tongue as I stood in the shadow of that once fiery volcano. These little berries were as unforgettable as a first true love might be.
Alonsa Guevara celebrates exceptional fruits in her wonderful “Fruit Portraits” Series. Each painting features a single fruit, posing, as if it were a human striving for its perfect angle and lighting, to look its best as it is immortalized.
Born in Rancagua, Chile, Guevara grew up in the middle of a lush tropical forest in Ecuador.
Guevara works primarily in oil paint to create portraits that are both hyper-realistic and surreal.
When she works from real life, Guevara takes particular care in how she cuts each fruit as it affects the color, pattern, and texture. She works with each fruit’s innate design to maximize visual impact.
“The Fruit Portraits represent desire, fecundity and fertility,” Guevara explains. “All the fruits in my paintings can be delicious/poisoning, juicy/rotten, real/fantastical, and in this way fertility and life are in a parallel with decay and death.”
Like trompe l’oeil, Guevara’s portraits create strong illusions. They inspire taste, touch, and smell, as if they were giant juicy realities.
Many of the fruit portraits are also derived from Guevara’s imagination. Some are fantastical fusions of two or more real fruits. Others represent Guevara’s childhood memories of tropical fruits in her native jungle which she has been unable to find in real life since.
In addition to the Fruit Portrait Series, Guevara created a more complex set of portraits, featuring both people and fruits together in the Ceremony Series. These life-seized paintings are full of fantasy, as the artist creates imaginary fruit-forward worlds, rich in symbolism and ritual.
Ceremony portraits depict fruits used as decoration and prayer. They are brimming in overabundance, dripping in color and luscious fruity flesh. They feel freshly paradoxical, both innocent and erotic, perfect and blemished, ripe and decayed, real and imagined.
Artists such as Christian Rex Van Minnen, Julie Heffernan, Luis Meléndez, Frans Snyders, and John Singer Sargent serve as Guevara’s main inspirations. Dutch Golden Age styles are also evident.
Guevara holds a BFA from Pontific Catholic University of Chile and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She currently lives and works in New York City.
She was recently named one of Time Out New York’s five most important new artists.
This artist is represented by Anna Zorina Gallery, in New York.
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