What you need to know before visiting ‘The Light of the Firefly’, Roberto Noboa’s exhibition at the MAAC

Then the Guayaquil artist Roberto Noboa was 8 years old, the luminous presence of the fireflies are forever etched in his memory after meeting them in person one evening at his parental home, located in the citadel of Los Ceibos (Guayaquil).

Almost as if it were a Steven Spielberg movie, Roberto and his cousin were probably running or playing football in the garden with only the moon offering them some light – when a swarm (hundreds) of fireflies engulfed that natural spaceand fascinates them with its beautiful appearance.

“It was quite a spectacle, something I remember to this day,” says Noboa. “But it didn’t stop there, because with my cousin We decided to take them to my room to see what would happen. We found some covers and went back into the garden to fill them with fireflies, always very carefully, and we released them in my room, which was not very large and had a low ceiling. We turned off the lights and the show was even more intense. Then we opened the windows and brought them back to their habitat‘, continues the artist who today uses that moment from his childhood as a source of inspiration for the exhibition Hotaru No Hikari (The Light of the Firefly), already open to the public MAAC (Malecón and Loja).

Fireflies are one of the protagonists of the exhibition that includes 30 pieces (drawings and paintings) and other characters such as rabbits. The curatorship is responsible for Mónica Espinel.

gesture painting

These works are somewhat influenced by Japanese art (or even calligraphy) and reflect the artist’s urgency and drive to tell and depict these scenes. “I have always been interested in painting with more gestures, where the line is clear or the artist’s hand is visible and I can read how the painting is put together through the brush strokes, the movement of the brush, In that sense there is movement and you see the process of how that painting was created (…) It is as if it has to say something and I have to say it at this moment and I want that haste to be noticed, the process goes hand in hand with that speed.”

30 years since the first sample

Last July, Noboa commemorated three decades since the first exhibition he participated in in Guayaquil: the July 1993 Salon. He came to our city in the summer of that year and decided to send some paintings to see what would happen. Even then, one of his artistic themes was highlighted: childhood.

“Between those two paintings there was one in which a child appeared and although I did not choose that, I have always been interested in the study of what it means to grow up. I have been working on it in my paintings through personal memories and it is a theme that has always haunted me and that I have also pursued as a game. now in a conscious way, but when I started my career, around the age of 23, the figures appeared,” says the painter who also He includes animals in his repertoire (birds, chickens, crows, dogs, deer, deer, cats and now fireflies).

A fragmented story

The pieces in this exhibition manifested as you remember childhood: non-linear, disorderly., through memory-saving pieces, with different nuances. “The same way I create my art, the same way I work on my paintings or drawings,” emphasizes Noboa, who invites every visitor to the exhibition to give their personal interpretation. “I am interested in the fact that each person can have their own reading, their own experience of going through the exhibition, that they leave feeling different than when they arrived, breathing differently.”

The museography

Visitors are greeted by the largest piece of the exhibition (4 meters, 20 centimeters wide and 2 meters high), entitled The vacuum, followed by drawing Three rabbits and the absence of one (20 centimeters, pencil on paper).

“It’s a drawing where three rabbits appear and where there was a fourth, I cut out that space so that’s the absent rabbit, because There is also a nostalgic element in the exhibition, of something that was there and is no longer there and I have faced that absence, I managed to create a degree of melancholy and even romance in some images, such as “The Rabbit Boy.”

Techniques and mastering the pastel shade

There are drawings, oil on canvas, watercolor, collage and pastel, as the technique that dominates the color palette. “It is an exhibition with pastel shades, although I have been exploring and researching color for years, for this exhibition I was interested in dealing with these pastel colors which also speak a bit about innocence or childhood.