MEDIA AND ITS EFFECTS THROUGH FABRIZIO ARRIETA'S PAINTINGS

¡That land existed only by thought... it was truly flat!

At Diablo Rosso think tank and art space located in the center of Panama City in Panama, the Costa Rican artist Fabrizio Arritea (Costa Rica, 1982) presents since December 1st La Tierra era Plana (The Earth Was Flat), an individual exhibition that explores the meaning production generated by social media and their effects over people acting or thinking.

Ph: Rafael Salazar

La Tierra era Plana consists of painting series that border between abstraction and figurativism, a motif that is manifested in their defragmented images. Thus, Arrieta's works not only emphasize the criticism of the cognitive processes produced by the media, but also its relation to painting and art history.

The central theme of the exhibition is to highlight the effects that the media have on the personal construction of identity, "understanding identity as an unstable value transmitted by many factors", they explain from the Panamanian space. It is from this idea that arises in his works the use of images used in fashion magazines, for example, to represent the ways in which we relate to the environment today.

"La Tierra era Plana such as the canvas of a painting is. The subject is solid, according to a social agreement. Gravity works without being seen. The stories are polished with time, they bring out the victories, thread the story from one imaginary place to another. The illusion ends in reality and this, already digested, serves as a springboard to a new fiction. La Tierra era Plana is inhabited with its own natural laws, pleasures, discords and conflicts, without time nor determined place ", sketches the text that accompanies the exhibition. 

It is within a plane of fiction that the Costa Rican artist finishes shaping his work. The images constitute their own natural laws, pleasures, discords and conflicts, without time or place. The characters of the paintings, their ideas and structures are established from assumptions, constructions and imagined interpretations. "Planning a question based on a supposed mistake, Arrieta plays with fiction as the determining role in the creation of his reality and with that, replaces the missing data to give meaning to the unknown," they say from Diablo Rosso.