The main theme in the art of Melissa Larrañaga (Lima, 1976) is nature, and particularly, the flora. Her work recovers the fascination towards the form and beauty of plants and flowers, something that has strangely become rare in today’s contemporary art.

 

She has given plants a protagonist role, transforming them into an aesthetic centre that reaches much further than their traditional ornamental use.“Peruvian Rainforest Visions” focuses on the many visits the artist has made to this geographic area. It gathers her impressions of different species, avoiding photographic references and recurring only to her memory, as well as her personal experience. In other words, Melissa is not interested in showing each plant as an archetype, but rather her pictorial representations are the result of the artist and her circumstances, which are, of course, unique and unrepeatable.

 

On this occasion, her artistic language is inclined towards a certain grade of abstraction, where the resulting forms follow the texture of each painted species, highlighting their morphologic and chromatic particularities. At the same time, there is a subtle reference to the geometric designs proper of the Peruvian Amazonian cultures, a language that is now a global trend. Melissa Larrañaga’s art, in her long and well-recognized international career, remains faithful to her topics and convictions, consolidating in every brushstroke an authentic admiration for nature materialized in a silent explosion of beauty and colour.