On July 25, 1824, the people of Nicoya and Santa Cruz gathered in an open town hall and voted. Not under pressure, not by conquest — by choice. Seventy-seven percent of the population of the Partido de Nicoya chose to join Costa Rica, under a slogan that has been repeated here every July since: De la patria por nuestra voluntad. Of the homeland, by our will.
That vote is what Guanacaste Day commemorates. What is now Costa Rica's most celebrated province — the Gold Coast, the province of beaches and volcanoes and the country's national tree — came into the nation freely. The anniversary is marked every July 25 with parades, music, traditional dance, horse processions, and the particular pride of a place that knows its own story.
At Sol Gallery, we mark it differently this year. With two artists who carry this land's history in their work, in different ways and from different angles.
on exibit
two artists, one land
At Sol Gallery this month, two artists whose work could only have come from this land. One works in oil and acrylic, painting what Guanacaste remembers — its birds, its spirits, the quiet life of the mountains of Nicoya. The other works in clay and fire, carrying a pre-Columbian tradition that runs through five generations of his family. Different materials, different histories, the same rootedness.
Nicoya, Guanacaste
alberto carmona — painting what guanacaste remembers
Alberto Carmona grew up in the mountains of Nicoya, surrounded by rivers and waterfalls, learning to draw at his mother's side and studying the great Costa Rican masters before most children learned to write. By seventeen he was already selling small works. It was not until 2020 that he committed fully to painting as his life's work — and since then, what he has made is a sustained document of what this land carries in its memory.
His Sueños del Trópico series places women of Guanacaste at the center of the canvas, each one accompanied by a native bird perched at her shoulder — a specific, ornithologically accurate bird from the coast and forest of this province. The women are not posed or idealized. They are present. The birds are their familiars, their counterparts, their companions in a world where the natural and the human are not separated.
But it is Alberto's paintings of the Pisuicas that do something rarer. The Pisuicas are the spirits of Guanacaste folklore — ghostly figures said to appear at night on rural roads, in the trees, at the edges of fields. They are part of the oral tradition that runs beneath the official history of this province: the stories grandmothers tell, the warnings whispered after dark. Carmona paints them not as illustration but as memory, giving visual form to something that has lived in spoken language for generations.
Working from his finca in the mountains, in the quiet that he says allows his subjects to emerge, Alberto paints in pure connection with the land he has never left. That rootedness shows in the work. It is not possible to mistake it for something made anywhere else.
guaitil, guanacaste
frank campos — five generations of guanacaste clay
Frank Campos comes from Guaitil, the small community in the canton of Santa Cruz that has been the center of Chorotega ceramic tradition in Costa Rica for centuries. His practice is not a revival or a homage — it is a continuation. Five generations of his family have worked this clay. The techniques, the materials, and the iconography he uses are inherited, guarded, and not fully explained to outsiders. That guardedness is itself part of what he is protecting.
The Chorotega people were among the most sophisticated ceramic cultures in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Long before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they were producing vessels, figures, and ceremonial objects whose formal complexity and symbolic density placed them among the finest artisans of the ancient Americas. The Nicoya Polychrome ceramic tradition — red, black, and cream designs on hand-formed clay — is recognized internationally and lives in museum collections around the world.
What Frank Campos makes at Sol Gallery grows from that tradition without being reducible to it. His comal de tortilla pieces take the form of the flat clay disc that has anchored the Guanacaste kitchen for over two hundred years — the object on which tortillas are made, on which maize and cacao are toasted, on which the day begins. He brings that form off the hearth and onto the wall. Some pieces are glazed in teal, cobalt, and turquoise oxide combinations. Others are fired through a specialized hardwood process that produces a deep, matte black that photographs cannot fully capture.
The iconography on his surfaces carries Chorotega visual language. The meaning belongs to the tradition he comes from. We describe what we can see and leave the rest where it belongs.
on EXHIBIT
THE STUDIO SEASON
The walls are alive right now. New works from across the gallery's roster, a space devoted to Guanacaste's cultural roots for the July 25 holiday, and our artists in the studio painting commissions and new inspirations. This is Sol Gallery in July — come see what's taking shape.
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