Xavier Portilla was born in Guayaquil in 1965. His studies were carried out with masters such as César Andrade Faini, Ricardo Florsheim and Isabel Tamayo, from whom he absorbs their best knowledge in the different fields of art. This preparation, to which Portilla gave himself with such enthusiasm, leads him to draw with confidence and to dominate the tonalities, the contrasts of color and balance —so necessary between light and shadow—. These achievements have led him to embrace the different thematic of art with such success.

For Portilla, color is fundamental in his work, an aspect that it dominates and absorbs him, and he engages with it with great passion; and as he expresses “color conductor of light, of life, without it we would be living in a world of absolute monotony”.

In these pages* we see his work with great clarity, in which he openly transmits all his artistic potential, most particularly the magical realism period, in which nature’s components are open and captivates the audience. His paintings include elements with texture, and he delimits well-defined lines, where there are hamlets, church towers, bells, angels, butterflies, flowers, fish, birds, trees, fruits, horses, carousels, among others.

Later, the painter made the decision of venturing outside and settle in Miami (United States), motivated by friends and collectors who knew his work and were sure that he would succeed there. It should be noted that it was The Garden of the Art Gallery, in San Sebastian, Florida, that recognize the value of his paintings and propose him to work with them. Portilla accepts with pleasure, without leaving aside that this may appear as an immense opportunity, but the change was nonetheless very drastic, as his work had achieved a recognition and admiration in Ecuador.