Long Story Short / Fabrizio Arrieta

Long Story Short / Fabrizio Arrieta

Before having any notion of art and from a very young age, Arrieta was familiar with the practice of painting. A sort of dialectic that still accompanies him: painting to understand why he paints. At that time, his approach to art history was through books, mainly from the 20th century. Later, he experimented with the process he has been perfecting ever since, which allowed the professionalization of his practice: the gesture of destroying to rebuild.

Fabrizio Arrieta (b. 1982, Costa Rica) is a Costa Rican visual artist who explores the mutable nature of identity in the contemporary era and examines how mass media influence the construction, metamorphosis, and control from the collective, highlighting the impact of consumerism and visual culture on the perception of oneself and others. Arrieta appropriates images from high-fashion editorials, fashion, and social media as raw material to transform and reinterpret them, as if he were part of a system that only he is aware of, with the peculiarity that they represent the otherness he does not recognize in his context.

These images soon become manipulated in such a way that they disappear, leaving perhaps only the trace of the inherent beauty they contain. It is enough to pay attention to observe other things that come into play, something that is not obvious and unsettling, between the abstract and the figurative and the complexity or layers that the images he works with have in themselves: tensions between that beauty and opulence, identity and alienation; between order and chaos; what is hidden and what is revealed.

In "Autorretrato" the only obvious thing is the title. Clues are hidden like a puzzle, with fragments reflecting self-image as a form of self-knowledge. The child acts as a bridge between past and present, offering a pause for the viewer to explore the present more deeply.

The human figure occupies a central place in his compositions, deliberately contorted, stuck, transformed, and disfigured to convey the inner turmoil of human identity within an apparently absurd world.

🗓️ Aug 16, 2024 to Sep 3, 2024

📍 @longstoryshort.nyc 291 Grand Street, NY 10002  

🎨 @fabrizioarrieta #fabrizioarrieta

Autorretrato ( Selfportrait)

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Dimensions: 180 x 150 cm

Published on August 28, 2024