What strikes me most about Servio Zapata’s landscapes is the ambiguity that runs through them, a sort of indefinition between the illusion of witnessing a hyperrealist painting, a faithful and meticulous reproduction of reality, and the sensation that we are facing a fantastical creation. This seemingly realistic landscape has been subtly altered, either through the exaggeration of figures, an overwhelming proliferation of trees, or the addition of foreign elements to the recreated world, like those lakes in the midst of dense vegetation whose shapes often resemble maps, conflicted or unresolved cartographies (the same map of Ecuador or Yasuní, subject to territorial and ecological disputes). In these particular cases, that encoded political subtext causes the seemingly stable and paradisiacal surface to waver.

What must be emphasized is that, often in Zapata’s paintings, there is an element that seems out of place, an element that, upon closer inspection, does not seem to belong to that original habitat: a tree, a mountain, a river, a lake, a cloudiness, or a light or color tone that feels out of sync, that derealizes the scene (derealization not in a pathological sense, but an aesthetic one: the artist perceives the outside world as something strange or unreal). It is these rearrangements of the natural landscape, these added elements, that give Zapata’s work its singularity and charm.

– Cristóbal Zapata