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The brilliant colors and dazzling forms that characterize the tradition of Latin American art are still found in contemporary painting today. The talented artists collected here channel their zest for life, transforming it into energetic paintings that explore the individual world while celebrating the beautiful people and places that surround it. Agora Gallery’s Masters of the Imagination offers a rare chance to experience the nuances of fine art by Latin American artists, not merely with the eyes, but the heart. Los brillantes colores y deslumbrantes formas que caracterizan la tradicíon del arte latinoamericano todavía hoy son encontrados en la pintura contemporanea. Los talentosos artistas recopilados canalizan su alegría por la vida, transformandola en pinturas energeticas que exploran el mundo invididual mientas que celebran la belleza de la gente y los lugares que lo rodean. Galerias Agora con su exibicíon Maestros de la Imaginacíon., nos ofrece una rara chance de experimentar los matices de un arte fino por artistas latinoamericanos, no solo con los ojos sino con el corazón.
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Daniel De Souza
 
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Childhood memories have a special tincture. They are almost literally colored by inexperience, by our having yet to acquire much in the way of patterns of processing life. The digital art of Daniel De Souza touches us with just that sort of saturated mnemonic encoding. That he uses this aesthetic to inform portraiture of children couldn’t be more fitting. The birth of his own daughter so heightened his sensitivity to children’s needs that he switched from oil painting to digital art so as to shield her from the toxins in oils. From there, it was a small step for this former street urchin of the Brazilian favelas to want to document the plight of the current generation in that unfortunate lineage.
De Souza is a pioneer of digital painting in Brazil, using camera and computer to capture and bring forth the innocent beauty of those to whom he relates so well. Not surprisingly, Daniel De Souza invests much of the proceeds from his artwork in ways that contributes to the betterment of his subjects.
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"Madonna"
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"Gabriel"
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Christine Drummond
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“The ultimate goal of art is JOY” (Gotthold E. Lessing) This quotation resonates with me very strongly, because “Joy” is exactly what I want to bring to people through my paintings... “Joy” through the choice of colors, the theme, the life and movement I bring to the canvas with each stroke of my palette knife. When I complete a painting, my strongest wish is that those who see it will be drawn into it and want to be part of the happy atmosphere. If people feel good when they look at one of my pieces, if my paintings brighten their day in any way, then my mission as an artist is completely fulfilled.
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"Movement and Colors"
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"Windy Market"
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Edna EdNa
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Puzzling together an array of different mediums from collage to paint, EdNa defies the sleek and seamless that some artists hide behind. Too often we're unable to see the artist behind the mask, but EdNa wants to show her face, her hard working hands. We're meant to see her seams, the tape that connects two pieces of text or mends a tear. She intends for us to realize what it is to piece together a work of art and to stitch meaning into an image. Seeing the process results in an appreciation for art that is hard to come by in something more manufactured. Text is a recurring material and theme in EdNa's work, proof that, as she's stated, literature has been a determining factor in her life.
An understanding of the bricolage of the modern world guides her, bringing to light the idea that no art stands in isolation. The fragmenting and puzzling back together of images and shapes allows the audience to feel part of a collaboration. It is raw, unique, and ultimately timely.
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"Guardo un Recuerdo"
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"Al Son"
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Luis Granda
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Although Luis Granda works in a modern, expressive style that is distinctly reflective of his own time, the artist honors long forgotten traditions of the great masters in order to add a deeply personal touch to his bold yet eloquent paintings. By customizing his canvases and mixing each of his pigments by hand, Luis Granda creates works of art which are complete expressions of his artistic spirit. Over time, Granda developed a system of iconography which expresses his inner thoughts and emotions through visual means, which he now incorporates into each carefully planned painting. After thoughtfully choosing his thematic elements, Granda then selects colors which will best express the emotive properties of his subjects. Finally, Granda's application of the paint to the canvas creates rich surface textures that heighten the overall effect of the painting.
While Granda's works can be appreciated for their aesthetic beauty, artful composition and traditional craftsmanship, they also project raw emotion and hidden narratives which heighten their allure. Luis Granda divides his time between Mexico and Europe.
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"Ready to Fly"
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"Box and Woman"
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Ammer Jacome
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Ancient meets post-modern in Ammer Jacome´s paintings. The Brazilian artist paints stunning portraits that transcend heritage. Jacome spans the wide spectrum of the beauty of humanity. Native Americans and Carnival performers, warriors and children, take center stage in the artist´s dramatic portrayals of life. While the subject matter is timeless, Jacome´s style is of the moment. Most notable is his tendency to fragment imagery.
A standard portrait gets a not-so-standard treatment when Jacome slices the canvas into several horizontal chunks of color. The image pushes past each of the color blocks, as if each panel is a different lens through which the artist and the viewer can see the subject. In other portraits, the subject matter is treated to bold cropping. Close ups of faces denote each person´s strength of character. The personal portraits are like stills from a movie. Brilliant turquoise and canary yellows burst from the canvas in strong brushstrokes, while tawny browns ground the paintings in a naturalistic setting. Full of energy, Jacome´s paintings stir the soul.
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"Children with Kite"
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"Indian with Earring"
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Ricardo Lowenberg
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Ricardo Lowenberg’s paintings are a personal, contemplative look into a captivating world of human drama and cryptic symbolism. Influenced by the Impressionists as well as the great Mexican muralists, he creates fascinating allegories and beautiful portraiture that are interspersed with lovely flora and idyllic landscapes. His brushwork is precise without appearing calculated and his palette is bright and tropical. The moods that Lowenberg conveys range from contemplative to joyous, the power of his characters lies in their statuesque features and potent eyes. Lowenberg’s sensitive renderings are cloaked in psychological drama that bestows the same prominence to banal daily activities and crucial life events. In the simple, everyday human activity there appears contemplation and ritual knowingly playing their part amongst the rhythms of nature. Meanwhile, Lowenberg’s landscapes and still-lifes are incredibly lush where cool blues and deep violets match the brilliant hues of citrus and verdant greens.
Ricardo Lowenberg’s work has been collected and exhibited throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
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"Monica"
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"Inocencia"
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Victor Meza
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Moments of everyday life in Victor Meza's ocean-side region in Chile take on a grandiose and mythic sheen in his hyper-real paintings. His minutely detailed oil on canvas works appear atmospherically stylized, tinted by memory, bleached by the sun or dulled by the gray light of fogs and clouds. A brilliant sensitivity to light runs throughout Meza's work, rolling over gentle waters, booming down from monumental cloud formations, or pooling and radiating from soft, sun-splashed surfaces. Accordingly, such spectacular attention to light and shadow underlines the surreal quality of Meza's exquisitely-rendered textures, a sense that in the absence of the object itself he has exaggerated its properties to convey them more sharply.
These infinite details lend Meza's subjects their mythic glow, giving the most quaint seaside composition a supernatural radiance. Each painting reveals a predilection for nature, depicting some moment of connection between humanity and its ecosystem. Between his choice of subject matter and aesthetic mode, Meza evokes a yearning for the spectacular wonders of nature.
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"Occidente"
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"Pesquero"
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Davor Pavlovic
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The paintings of Davor Pavlovic harness the graphic force of perfect/pure contrast to evoke the intensity and immensity of natural forms. Using black acrylic on white linen, Pavlovic epitomizes the less-is-more axiom of minimalism, where composition, stripped to its essentials, expands and emboldens the range of its reference. While the black and white palette creates stirring, almost suspenseful images, Pavlovic's formal control gives rise to a freeing abstraction, an alluring and intimate vision of calm. The dramatic possibility of each painting is subtly composed, allowing the images to be both emphatic and inconclusive, which allows the paintings, like the materials themselves, to touch on the elemental. Whether sinuous or planar the lines imply naturalistic forms –valleys, bluffs, escarpments – derived from the landscape of Pavlovic's native Chile. The vista opened by the perfect contrast of those lines exudes a sense of the sublime.
An architect as well as an artist, Davor Pavlovic's art is likewise distinguished by a nimble sense of geometry, balance and perspective.
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"C8"
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"C4"
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Dago E. Seguel
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Dago E. Seguel has dedicated much of his artistic journey to perfecting realism, surrealism and abstract techniques in his painting. Primarily using oil on canvas, his work glorifies the human spirit, translates and evokes strong feelings, and expresses the complexities of human emotion and the world around him. The result is a beautiful, thought-provoking collection of images that exhibit a remarkable technique and talent.
Dago E. Seguel isn’t just a painter - he’s an engineer. Whether painting the harmonic churning of hundreds of machine parts, or expertly recreating the way light plays on defined muscles and human flesh, his composition and attention to detail are careful and intricate. His work explores a fascination with the mechanics of things, life’s mysteries and the finite realities of life and death, and the viewer becomes equally fascinated while taking all of Sequel’s imagery in. Dago E. Seguel was born in Santiago, Chile. His work is collected widely in South America.
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"Sinergia"
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"Abduccion"
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Sandra Valentim
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Sandra Valentim’s passion for the luminous dimensions of the human spirit and its manifestations in motion, countenance and physicality pour through her oil and acrylic explorations into portraits and scenes ranging from the playfully emotive to abstractly ambient. Following in the tradition of Picasso, Valentim records her rawest impressions of life in a language of colors and shapes of her own devising, often flooding Cubist inspired slices of life with warm colors that echo her affection for her subjects. At the same time she remains inquisitively reaching with her angles and hue choices, rendering vividly contradictory feelings and suggestions across the faces and personalities she delicately erects. Her deceptively flat facial expressions tend to contrast strikingly with her lush Gauguinian palettes that swarm around them.
Valentim lives and works in her native country of Brazil, where she has autodidactically nurtured her approach to painting, siphoning the primary colors around her and establishing a singularly identifying style.
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"Mascara 23"
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"Mascara 24"
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Lee Vanderwalker
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The Detroit born artist, Lee Vanderwalker, now lives and breathes the vibrant culture of Belize, calling upon its history and aesthetic as a foundation for her art. The difficult medium of hand-painted silk, combined with her use of rich, smoldering colors, makes the work vibrate. Each culturally driven scene and image tells a story that is at once derived from the region and universal. Her depictions of village and island life, still-lifes of flowers and window-framed seas, and dream-like figures, masks, and Mayan symbols, come to life with each fold of silk and each vivid texture. Her work is exotic yet comforting, enticing in the way that traveling is or getting lost in a familiar book. These deceptively simple works spring from the complexity of tradition and weave together the deep roots of artistic history.
In this world of velvety jungles begging to be explored and Caribbean legends hungry to be told, Vanderwalker's paintings allow the viewer to indulge in the distant adventure we all desire.
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"Maxi and the Motorbike"
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"Bamboo and Banana Leaf"
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