In the Rough

“It is somewhat an uncanny experience to witness the fiction of nature, within itself. I guess contradictions are the only truthful way of speaking now-a-days”

– Quintín Rivera Toro

Inherited from the classical Greek tradition, 17^th century artists such as Annibale Carracci, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin developed the concept of ideal landscape. By following this canon, the elements of nature were carefully arranged on the pictorial composition in order to create an environment ruled by an atmosphere of harmony, balance, and timelessness.

The installation, Un Espacio Libre, by Puerto Rican artist Quintín Rivera-Toro, was located at the Pterocarpus Officinalis natural reserve at Dorado Beach. The artwork could be understood as an actualization of the landscape conception. Un Espacio Libre consists of a photographic series at a monumental scale depicting clouds over immense blue skies. The images were primitively conceived and installed in the urban milieu of Quintín’s natal city, Caguas, P.R., as a critique toward visual contamination, usually generated by the surplus of signs and billboard advertising. The series was placed in public spaces designated originally for advertising purposes, offering the audience a visual relief from the endless publicity that calls every day to ones attention. In this first presentation, the artwork had the intention of creating awareness of the image that should be part of the daily life but instead has been effaced because of how inaccessible it has become to get in contact with, for there is almost no chance to observe the sky as one transits the city inside an automobile among endless rows of buildings. The artwork by Rivera-Toro was an active proposal to sketch new ways that inhabit and design the urban space.