All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident,
because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.

— Francis Bacon

For this collective exhibition on contemporary painting, Galería Extra has invited a group of young emerging artists from the Central American region to exhibit their individual artistic visions through painting. Participating artists from Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador; Gabriela Novoa, Gerardo Gomez, Amber Rose, Yavheni de Leon, Jose Wolf, Camila Fernandez and Roberto Carter.

We find that in the artistic field and in the new contemporary practices of the region, painting both on the frame or as a performative gesture is having an upturn among the avant-garde artistic circles. In the case of this show, the aim is to expose a variety of aesthetic approaches to the 'traditional' medium of painting on canvas on a frame.

In the search for new representations, the artists featured lean towards a variety of ways and forms of expressing their concerns and investigations through the design and content of their paintings. Some point towards an expressive figurativism representing fantastic and erotic situations on scenarios of the Real; the body, landscapes and urban environments, others capture purely an emotive existentialism using the intensity of color through abstract compositions that relate to personal perceptions about their emotional relationship with the environment.

As a gallery and as a curatorial project, we are intrigued and restless to investigate and show what is happening in our immediate artistic context. At the same time we yearn to open a window to the world of how this local activity relates to the international production of such medium. We want to find out what is 'that' that artists want to frame, compose or articulate in the framework of their creations today. We refer to what the painter Paul McCarthy mentions as: "That which is associated with the construction of a place, the frame, an existence, an ordering, substitutes, necessity and the absurd", within the framework of artistic creation.

In a first attempt to exhibit different contemporary artistic visions, this exhibition seeks to open a space for conversation on the re-emergence of contemporary painting in the context of the Isthmus region. Although on this occasion we have focused more precisely on the formal aspects of the medium of painting and the format of the frame specifically, we have not limited ourselves in the curatorship of the discourses and contents treated within the individual proposals, we have left the artists complete freedom for the development of their themes and their research in their respective representations.