Symbolic Compositions: The Art Portfolio of Osvaldo Mesa
Dancing w: The Pharisees, oil on canvas
Osvaldo Mesa was born in Cuba, grew up in Miami, and later moved to Baltimore. In his practice Osvaldo works in a contemporary surrealist style, blending realistic lighting and volume with images that give personality and humanlike presence to strange objects, and symbolic compositions.
In Praise of Foreign Gods, oil on canvas
I like the colour palette that Osvaldo works with in his pieces. The artist favours earth tones and subdued colours, giving many of his works an aged quality that furthers the sense of depth in his works, and evokes symbolism of the religious or even occult variety. Though his works toe the line of abstraction in their use of seemingly invented objects and figures, the artist takes a classical realist approach to designing his figures and compositions.
I love the way the artist combines his usual style with abstract, repeating geometric patterns in some of his recent works. Osvaldo’s abstract figures are distinctly organic and bodily in these pieces, and the contrast between these figures and the patterned grounds is beautifully dynamic.
