Marcos Acosta might seem like an unlikely character to be carrying on the two-century-long tradition of Western American art in Colorado. He is Argentinian, and only moved to Denver two years ago.
But his landscape paintings of the stony canyons and craggy cliffs that define this part of the country seem to be everywhere these days. Collectors find the works appealing, and that means gallerists have taken to them as well. Acosta’s objects are a regular feature at exhibits and art fairs, and his distinct paintings pop up in the social media feeds of scrollers like me, whose algorithms cull this particular genre of art.
It helps that Acosta himself, a naturally charming and affable figure who is eager to talk about painting and landscape to anyone with a serious interest, is also a man about town. He shows up — at openings, in the studios of other artists, at various cultural events — and that has gone a long way toward making him known and watched by the arts community in a short amount of time.
His work conveys a similar sense of intimacy, despite the fact that it often takes on vast vistas of Western scenery. His just-opened solo show of paintings and drawings at K Contemporary gallery in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood — titled “Fragile Thought” — includes images of such wild wonders as Grand Junction’s National Monument, Eastern Colorado’s Paint Mines and Utah’s Arches National Park.
Acosta’s perspectives are up-close and personal. They are drawn from his own wanderings in open spaces, and they give viewers the sense of being in these places themselves, quietly strolling through gravel paths, looking out, up, and around as they discover one awesome formation after the next.
His 2026 oil-on-canvas painting “Is This a Sunset?,” for example, captures one of those outcroppings that are impossibly top heavy, with one large stone perched precariously atop a narrow column of rock. How has it not toppled over after so many centuries?
“Fragile Thought X,” a 2025 piece made with charcoal and colored pencils on paper, freezes one of those arches in Utah that similarly appear to defy gravity. The arch does not appear far off in the distance; instead, we are about to walk under it, to explore it personally and get to know it better. The work feels more like a portrait than an actual landscape.
That is just one of the ways Acosta’s work updates the Western art genre. His relaxed point of view is a far cry from the grandness or the grittiness that marked the work of Western painters past like Frederic Remington or Albert Bierstadt. Nor does it have the documentary feel of work by such icons as C.M. Russell or George Catlin, who were trying to record the Western way of life.
Instead, Acosta seems to be simply be inviting us along for a hike on a nice day. Wear good shoes, bring a camera, make sure you have water and sunscreen. His paintings are a friendly gesture better suited to our current age, when the best places to explore are easy to access, have well-groomed trails and parking lots close by.
Another — and perhaps more obvious — way that his works move the genre forward is through the distinct metaphysical edge he paints into them. Running through his valleys, lakes and snow-capped hills are interruptions of brilliantly colored, geometric forms — zig-zagging lines, monolithic rectangles, and shade-shifting bands of lemon yellow, tangerine, ocean blue, dusty pink and deep purple.
These unusual shapes — all with crisp edges, sharp angles and an unnatural glow — provide a stark contrast to the rough, irregular lines and organically muted hues of the natural landscape. They also connect Western paintings of old to a more contemporary genre of art: the geometric abstraction that became popular in the second half of the 20th century.
There are a lot of ways a viewer can take in this clash of forms and styles. Acosta’s bright shapes could be seen as apparitions of a sort. The arrival of something spiritual or otherworldly in a place that seems so grounded in the earth.
Or they could be interpreted as beams of energy that radiate within and from the more timeless objects Acosta depicts on canvas. A precise pairing of the landscape, this view argues, cannot just capture cliffs and clouds, it also needs to capture the waves of light, sound and feeling that have resided in these spaces over the ages.
Or they could simply be the human experience of seeing these wonders of nature in the flesh, so to speak, a manifestation of the feelings we have — the excitement, the fusion, the buzz — of being in the great outdoors.
Acosta recently told me that he wants his paintings to “create a door” through which viewers can feel the landscape with a fresh perspective, with their senses heightened and their minds keenly opened to both the tangible elements they encounter and also the unsolvable, and beautiful, enigmas that are not so easy to see at first glance. He wants to help them make the connections.
His work does that on a global scale, really. Before migrating to the U.S., he spent years painting the mountainous scenery of central Argentina in this way, presenting vistas of the Sierras de Cordoba, near where he lived.
He came to this country with his young family after he signed on to the roster of Hexton Gallery in Aspen a few years back. The response to his art was strong, and he wanted to be closer to the community that supported his career. The art market is healthier in the U.S. than it is in Argentina; in that way, it was a business decision.
But Acosta has found his place here, and that has its own sort of romance. So many of those Western painters we know and admire arrived here from somewhere else. Remington was from New York and remained an Easterner his whole life, except for his excursions in the West. Catlin was born in Pennsylvania and died in New Jersey. Russell grew up in St. Louis before moving to Montana in his late teens.
They were nearly all visitors or migrants in some way — unlikely characters in their own day to serve as ambassadors for Western art.
They were outsiders with fresh perspectives, unique histories, personal desires to make the same kind of connections between humans and nature that are at the heart of Marcos Acosta’s work.
IF YOU GO
Fragile Thought” continues through April 25 at K Contemporary, 1412 Wazee St. Itap free. Info: 303-590-9800 or kcontemporaryart.com.
