His art career has developed mainly in Germany where he has participated in countless group and solo exhibitions in various galleries and some museums.
Osvaldo Orias is an artist who understands painting as the direct expression of his sensitive world. It is a pictorial fact that visualizes meanings.
His painting is the fusion of a Latin American and European pictorial heritage, which makes his art an expression rich in tradition and at the same time contemporary.
During his stay in Germany, the artist became closely acquainted with the work of the main artists of the so-called "German Neo Expressionism".
From where he extracted the main teaching of expressionism: to express emotion directly. He also traveled extensively in Europe and complemented his training by visiting the best museums of contemporary art.
His other decisive influence was pre-Columbian art, which he had contact with since his childhood in the rich archaeological zone of Nicoya, his father's hometown.
There he discovered plastic values that excited and disturbed him greatly. He learned from ceramics the drawing made with natural pigments on backgrounds of different shades of ochre.
The artist takes the constructive forms he sees in nature and the human figure and turns them into his paintings. His motifs range from figurative to almost abstract.
For the artist, nature is full of organic or inert presences, rich in colors and textures, which speak of a complex universe.
Dr. Romana Breuer
A white sheet. A blank canvas. Beginning.
Motifs emerge from the darkness, become people, animals and plants on the drawing or painting surface, people with animal bodies or plants that move like animals - a picture grows. It virtually gives birth to itself from everything that is conceivable, tangible and rememberable. An image creation of Osvaldo Orias comes into being. Creation' is to be understood here quite literally, because the composition does not arise in a mental pre-construction but spontaneously in dialogue with color and form. And this dialogue is multi-layered: rather abstract surfaces correspond with the figurative bodies, but also condition each other. For this 'abstraction' is not a geometric-reductive one: stylized figurativeness refers to a prehistoric tradition, or at least allows it to shine through and be glimpsed.
Osvaldo Oria's motifs are fed by his feelings and experiences, by conscious and unconscious processes, and - to a particularly high degree - by his memory. It is the memory of his homeland Costa Rica. Existential experiences of nature from his childhood and youth - the warm golden moon, the glassy clarity of the sky, the noisy blackness of the forest - have burrowed deep into his memory as images and now emerge again, banished in color and form.
And again and again the witnesses of an even longer past time: found objects like fragments of pre-Columbian cult objects accompany his childhood just as the differently crystalline sand due to volcanism - '3 x seven' here also means 'fine sand'.
According to the characteristics of the emerging motif, Osvaldo Orias varies the technique. It is layered, scattered and scratched. It is applied and worked on with brushes or fingers, the oil paint is made to glisten with metal shavings and silenced with black sand, sugar-coated with white sand and concretized again with tiny white shells. The material is in the service of memory to the same extent as the arsenal of forms and colors. The many layers refer once again to the character of the picture's creation: analogous to the workings of nature, thoughts and sensations are deposited in the body of the picture. This becomes particularly clear in the carvings, which in some places seem like injuries to the body of the picture. Painful memories? The question remains open. They are further pictorial means that point to the close connection between mind and hand - as personal sediments that have been transformed into universal messages, as significant signs that can be interpreted in a supra-personal and supra-cultural way. Yet sometimes they remain enigmatic, leaving only a vague sense of familiarity. Painting against time.