Fabián Monge
Fabián Monge works through painting with the concept of perception and the way we look. With a pop style marked by the vibrant use of color, he questions the ambiguity of vision: "What is seen when we don't know what we are seeing?". His works, such as Borderline 1 and 2 presented at Saisho, invite the viewer to recover a childlike, prejudice-free gaze that highlights the inherent ambiguity of all interpretation. His career includes solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as the Municipal Museum of Cartago, as well as participations in local biennials and festivals. His work is part of private collections in Costa Rica, Chile, Spain, the United States, Guatemala, Belgium, and Italy. Coming from a humble and conservative peasant family, Monge has made controversy and the search for alternative perspectives a vital and artistic driving force. His interest in questioning the established and exposing new perspectives has defined both his plastic career and his personal and social position. In this process, he recognizes how each idea tested in social debate strengthens him, forcing him to open himself to dialogue, to respect opposing viewpoints, and even to incorporate them into his own. For Monge, human beings share a common template or universal basis upon which we build our differences. This common ground, transparent and preceding the social paradigms that condition us, constitutes the foundation of his artistic work. From there, his painting becomes a space for communication and understanding, where the ambiguous, the perceptual, and the imaginative intertwine to invite the viewer to see the world with different eyes.
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Meaningless data
For this line of work, I use the pareidolic projection that humans superimpose on reality. That information that comes more from our learning than from our innate ability to see the world as it is. The question: What is it that we see when we don't know what we are seeing? It is the only rule I use to limit the conceptual imaginary space of this line of experimentation. The study of Rorschach inkblots used in psychological therapy is an exercise where this projection of information onto random patterns is tested. Its intention is to play with these shapes, make them more or less suggestive of each other, rotate them, and arrive at producing images that intrinsically contradict our pareidolic projections among themselves, making us unable to give a definition, to choose a single projection that defines what we are seeing.
Radical Explanations
When I say that reality is hidden behind our senses, I mean that our limited cognitive perception is not capable of making an exact replica of the objective reality that surrounds us; we have to summarize and define it in relation to our personal history and our biological traits. Perspective, for example, is a very useful representation for understanding the depth of what we see, but it is a lie; things do not get smaller by being further away. The equal legs of a table appear to be of different sizes depending on the viewpoint where the observer is located, which creates discrepancies with the observer on the opposite side of the table. Both perspectives and the sum of all the others are what allow us to mentally generate a clearer image of what that table is really like, even if we cannot see it in that way.
Big Bag Continues
In this series, Fabián Monge starts from a radical premise: the Big Bang has not ended, it continues to expand, and we not only inhabit it, but we are part of that infinite explosion. His works translate this idea into images where bodies appear as biological expressions of the great cosmic detonation, living fragments of a universe that is remade at every instant. Rather than representing cosmic determinism, Monge seeks to embrace chaos and the incalculable, exploring the new as a permanent condition. To do this, he crosses two of his research lines, but instead of unifying them into a "theory of everything," he generates a new autonomous path. The result is a painting that evokes universal wonder, a space where the impossible becomes possible again, as in a child's gaze. In this vision, the universe is not an external stage, but all of us: life itself understood as a vibrant and continuous expression of the Big Bang.
