Beneath the Surface: Ricardo Báez Duarte’s Subaquatic Metaphysics

Ricardo Báez Duarte’s recent body of work defies the conventional boundaries between painting and photography, constructing a visual language that is at once lyrical and unsettling. Through the fusion of submerged figures with echoes of European cityscapes—Venetian canals, Roman arches, shadowed Gothic façades—his images stage a quiet, persistent question: what lies beneath appearances?

These “painterly-photographs” (as one might call them) are not simply aesthetic juxtapositions; they are philosophical meditations disguised as visual compositions. The watery realm in which his subjects drift or dissolve serves not only as a metaphor for the unconscious but also as a challenge to the clarity we expect from photographic truth. Is what we see a memory? A dream? A residue of someone else’s gaze?

Behind the symbols—flooded plazas, baroque reflections, translucent faces—lurks a more fundamental inquiry: what is existence when detached from linear time and stable identity? These works do not answer such questions. Rather, they suspend them in fluid ambiguity, offering viewers the experience of disorientation as a path toward deeper perception.

Báez Duarte’s art resists the noise of spectacle. It whispers instead. In these submerged urban moments, we are invited to see not just what is pictured, but what remains—unspoken, half-seen, almost lost—behind the veil of image and symbol.