NAYU CHAVARRÍA

Art came into my life, as I like to say, almost by accident. I stumbled into art. I worked in advertising and marketing my entire life and then a curator encouraged me to try, to experiment. And here I am, and here I continue.

Since then, painting has become my form of communication. It is my most authentic voice, a direct way of expressing what is within me, even before I fully understand it myself. Through art, I can share emotions, memories, and thoughts that are translated into color and form on a canvas. The work is born from an intimate process where something that once belonged only to me is now offered to others.

Color is my essence. It is my language, my way of conveying a memory, an emotion, a sensation. When I paint, I find my identity in color, movement, and form. I cease to be a concrete human figure and become pictorial matter: blue, green, pink. I do not seek to be an example or to convey a universal truth, I just paint to be, to exist within a visual language that represents me more faithfully than words.

I work with expressionist resources, primarily color and organic forms that allow me to release what I feel, what I think, and what I observe, without the need for literal representation. Abstraction allows me to transform my inner world into a visual reality, and that passage from thought to image is where I find the greatest joy in the artistic process.

My gesture is very intuitive. I often make studies on paper, exploring color, visual language, and what I want to communicate. I make, as we say, a few “scribbles” or sketches and then follow them. When I am completely convinced by something I achieved in a study, I try to remain faithful to it on the canvas. But very often—and those are often the works I like the most—I begin with a conceptual idea in my mind and start bringing it onto the canvas. Then it begins to flow. The canvas speaks to me and I respond, and gradually we become one.

For me, painting is an act of surrender. It is following the impulse of a curve, allowing myself to be carried by an unexpected harmony of colors, breaking forms, and dissolving into a plane that, ideally, never comes to an end.

Living in Guanacaste makes my creative process much more fluid and much freer. It has to do with the context of the region—the sea, the people, the different nationalities that come together here on the coast, those sunsets with their unrepeatable oranges, the pale blues of the sea, and those intensely green plains with endless shades of green. Color here is incredibly powerful, and it deeply permeates my work.

I am a very optimistic person, and I believe my work reflects that. Even when I want to tell a story that is less joyful, more reflective, or contemplative, the positive side always finds its way through. I want those who approach my work to feel an emotional openness, a positive resonance. I want to invite them to connect, to feel a vital and generous energy, a sense of closeness and empathy. I want the viewer to move beyond being a passive observer and become integrated into the work. Ultimately, I want to bring people a dose of joy. I want them to smile when they stand in front of my work and to feel some of the optimism that we need so much today.