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The art of Ismael Checo draws from the twin sources of creativity- art and life. He is a consummate master of the genres of still life, portraiture and landscape. No day passes without his recording a fresh face, a change of atmosphere, an unexpected fall of light, or some unfamiliar texture or hue, and he paints with undisguised pleasure and assurance without sacrificing spontaneity and a dose of healthy self-criticism.
A strict adherence to observable fact suggests that Ismael Checo falls altogether outside the boundaries of modernist art yet his brushwork and technique relate his art to many of the most advanced aspects of contemporary painting. Despite its seeming naturalness, his work owes as much to artifice as it does to nature - to the past, if you will, as much as to the present, a central tenet of post-modernist doctrine. His genius manifests itself in the variegated richness of his spontaneous yet controlled brushwork, the subtle refinements of his palette (recalling the work of Dario Suro and even Jose Vela Zanetti) , the remarkable acuity of his visual memory, and, most importantly, a resolute refusal to align himself with any particular fashion in art or type of commission, however advantageous that might be to his well-being or fortuna critica.
Ismael Checo is a painter with a knack for finding beauty where other people have overlooked it. Although his subjects are drawn from the world, trouble politics and complex sociology are not what he is out to capture; his terrain is of a different kind, propelled by close looking at things which delight him. He is, by his own description, a “perfectionist,” preferring to address the ubiquitous, those things familiar and accessible. He is a master of all small truth about the particular light of a particular place, a specific quality of this one thing. In his hands, the ordinary is transformed into something finer and more enduring. Checo is a realist who always works from direct observation. It is easy to admire the artist’s fastidious observation and industriousness in rendering what he sees. He has a fine eye for how the world appears, for recognizing and rendering enough detail to persuade, not so much as to overwhelm. He knows how to keep details in their place, allowing form to exist as edgeless presences, skies to merge with the land, figures to dissolves into the background. Ismael Checo has a disciplined attention to the organized field of painting. One is reminded of impressionism in its purer ninteenth century incarnations but impressionism as a carefully built structure. Something calculated to interest or hold the eye. Such attention to formal concerns - composition, paint application, and surface textures - recalls impressionism yet these concerns are absorbed without compromising the artist’s primary attention to recognizable subject matter.
Alexis Mendoza/ Curator