Francisco Amighetti: El maestro y su técnica, presentados por uno de sus discípulos

Arriving to his one hundred year birthday, on June 2007, Costa Rican Fine Arts have celebrated one of its best elements; don Francisco Amighetti Ruiz (1907-1998). He was a self taught: painter, muralist, printmaker and poet. He also was one of the strongest professors at the University of Costa Rica's School of Fine Arts and known as one of the best artists in Costa Rica's 2nd half of the 20th Century. He started as draughtsman with simplicity, drawing caricatures of people from San José City�s parks. He has discovered Cubism and the new 20th century avantgard mouvements, because he was an avid reader of anything on art that arrives to San José. Later on, he was able to free himself from Cubism, when he had learned about Japanese art. Mexican Masters had influenced his paintings and murals, and as he grew up in his art making and his expertise in Art History, he developed his very own style that some had described it like a blend of primitivism and expressionism. This is shown mainly on his prints dated after the end of the 1960s. Simplicity is present in his style of life as well as in his technique. He liked to transfer the design to a blackened wooden board with Chinese ink so he can experience similar results than the print between the freshly carved surface and the inked one, he also liked to hand print using a metal spoon to press the paper on top of the inked board. The lost San José�s rural landscape arose from the dialogue established between his carving gouges and the wood, showing universal themes on Art History, often observed through a mythic window or as a window itself, from which he also has said goodbye, two years before the ending of the century.Al cumplirse cien años de su natalicio, en junio de 2007, las artes plásticas costarricenses celebraron a uno de sus mayores exponentes, don Francisco Amighetti Ruíz (1907-1998), autodidacta: pintor, muralista, grabador en madera y poeta; uno de los profesores más influyentes en la Escuela de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Costa Rica y también, reconocido como uno de los artistas plásticos de mayor relevancia en la segunda mitad del siglo XX en Costa Rica. Como dibujante se inició con la mayor sencillez, haciendo caricaturas de personajes en los parques josefinos, y como ávido lector de todo lo que llegara a la capital sobre arte, descubrió el cubismo y se introdujo con esto en las corrientes de vanguardia de la primera mitad del siglo XX; luego, conoció el arte japonés, que lo ayudó a liberarse del cubismo. Su técnica, como su estilo de vida se basó en la sencillez: pasar el dibujo a una tabla ennegrecida con tinta china, para visualizar el resultado de la talla con las gubias, aplicar las tintas e imprimir presionando el papel con una cuchara de metal. El paisaje rural josefino, que se perdía con el crecimiento inevitable de la ciudad, resurgió del diálogo entre sus gubias y las tablas, evocando temas universales en la Historia del Arte, muchas veces vistos a través de una mítica ventana o como una ventana en sí misma, desde la cual, también, se despidió un día, a dos años de finalizar su siglo XX