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Miguel Osuna may rightly be called a landscape painter, but his landscapes have steadfastly defied convention. In his earlier work, the landscapes had the feeling of fleeting memories, captured from moving cars in a rainy urban monochrome -an external reality experienced by an eerily collective subjectivity. In his new series the landscape goes internal. The rigorous attention to detail and the melancholy blur that envelopes the whole are still present, only now the portal of the canvas leads one less to a distant memory of a place seen out the car window, and more to a fractal of some present internal moment, into the neural pathway of the process of memory itself perhaps. The mind, confronted with an incomprehensible level of detail, survives the experience by softening the edges, and imagining blur where none exist, color where only black and white materials are present, and light emitting without source. The artist continues to lure and inspire his viewers into oddly tender relationships in unexpected places. Much as one developed a fondness for the caressing curve of hard concrete pillars in the earlier work by freezing a moment usually experienced at high speeds, the new series invites us to caress the unfolding undulations of our own minds, by suspending a landscape of details that are usually processed in milliseconds and discarded as so much white noise coming between us and our narrative viewing pleasure. Osuna's landscapes warp time. In a culture obsessed with ever faster delivery of information, his art takes as it subjects processes that move quickly, but his treatment of these subjects resolutely prioritizes the joy of lingering in the middle of the stream.
Greg Sax

© miguel osuna