Federico Herrero
The exhibition proposes an initial reading reviewing works spanning nearly three decades of continuous practice, from the early years of training to the present, tracing a journey that is simultaneously chronological and thematic. The exhibition departs from a productive paradox: Federico Herrero’s work has circulated extensively through museums and institutions in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States, yet its center of gravity has always remained in Costa Rica. San José is not only the place where he lives and works; it is the primary laboratory of his visual language, the city whose urban fragmentation, tropical luminosity, and culture of everyday painting directly fuel his practice. This review is made possible by the generous loan of families and private collections in the country that have safeguarded these works over the years, making it possible to bring them together for the first time in this context. What the exhibition offers, then, is not simply a journey through an individual trajectory, but a shared affective cartography: the history of a painting that remained in Costa Rica because it chose to stay.
Federico Herrero is known for vibrant paintings and large-scale installations that expand the language of abstraction toward architecture, landscape, and public space. His work explores color as an experiential structure that moves between painting, the urban environment, and ecological perception. Often referencing the rhythms of tropical landscapes and the spatial logic of cities, his practice dissolves the boundaries between painting and environment. Herrero’s painting is not an object—it is a condition of space, and color, an experience. From his early interventions in the urban environment of San José—the Rótulos of 2000, false or abstract signs that hacked the visual logic of the city—to his large institutional public paintings, his work operates through a continuous expansion: painting overflows the canvas, colonizes architecture, stains the floor, perforates the logic of the white cube. This is not installation, nor decoration. This is painting that has decided to take up more space than it is assigned.
His first institutional intervention—the bathroom of the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in San José in 2000—was, according to his own words, a beautiful failure: he wanted to be a house painter and the shapes of the ceiling and pipes seduced him. The Swiss-born curator Harald Szeemann saw that work and invited him to the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Since then, Herrero’s career has had that double nature: rooted in the local, recognized globally. San José appears in his work not as a motif or theme, but as a structure of thought. The city —always under construction, fragmented, traversed by contradictory signals—directly informs his way of constructing a painting. His first intervention in public space—retouching fading traffic lines—was an almost clinical gesture: repairing painting in space, keeping the language of the city alive.
Herrero works in groups of paintings, never just one at a time. He waits for the works to speak to him. He changes the orientation of canvases the way one tunes a radio. He conceives color as language, as poetry, as music: it has weight, temperature, sound. Composing a mural painting is, for him, like composing music in space. From that same logic emerged the sculptural volumes—an architecture of their own, halfway between the studio and the urban landscape—and the spaces he founded in San José: Despacio (2007) and cofounded: Cero Uno (2022).
I — The Paintings: Time as Territory
The Origin of a Dialogue: Venice, 2001
Among the works of the first nucleus—the one gathering paintings produced between 1999 and 2008—three pieces occupy a singular place in Federico Herrero’s trajectory. They were presented at the 49th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Plateau of Humanity,” under the curatorship of Harald Szeemann, in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, alongside artists from around the world. The artist was 22 years old. The dimension of that moment is not only biographical. It is structural. That a practice gestated in San José—nourished by the city, by its signals, by its culture of everyday painting—was recognized on the most demanding stage of international contemporary art not despite its origin but because of it, defines from early on the logic that runs through all of Herrero’s work: the periphery not as limitation but as position of enunciation.
Those three paintings inaugurated a dialogue with the world that has not ceased since. From Venice, Herrero’s work began to circulate internationally—galleries, biennials, institutions in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the United States—but his center of production remained invariably in Costa Rica. The exhibition at the Museo de Arte Costarricense has, in that sense, a dimension of return: what left, comes back. The three Venice paintings return to the context that generated them, and from there they are read differently. To these works are added others that evidence the development of the artist’s work. Changes at the level of stroke, the use of color, themes, and worldview become apparent. The passage of time is palpable, both at the level of the artist as an individual, and at the level of what we have collectively experienced as a society. Since the beginning of Herrero’s work to date, the way access to images through the internet has impacted, along with media saturation and immediacy, has varied considerably. This permeates both the consumption and production of images by the artist, where overstimulation intertwines with the abstraction of forms, rhythms, flat colors, and often soft-edged, undefined contours.
As mentioned by the French curator and critic Jérôme Sans in his text “Painting Can Look Back at You,” his figures with irregular and almost liquid compositions “…are like echoes of the current abundance of images, flowing without beginning or end, thrown into the vortex of endless, self generated, and decontextualized information—the insatiable modern ouroboros of content. These shapes, stacked one upon another, as if ceaselessly generating new ones, seem to lead toward magma, toward the mountain of images of our time.” [...]
Text by María José Chavarría Zamora and Federico Herrero