Colorfast

The colors of the paintings in Puntos de Vista: Five Latin American Artists in Atlanta at ArtWalk are so delirious, they inspire a Wizard of Oz moment.

Real life suddenly seems black and white compared to the juicy limes, molten oranges and Chiquita yellows employed by the five artists. The color scheme speaks a language of sun and water, bright stucco buildings, Technicolor bird plumage and rich, fruity flavors leeched into the brushes of these artists hailing from Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

While color is a constant in Puntos de Vista, much of the work is otherwise like night and day. Venezuelan artist Victoria Martin-Gilly makes interesting use of graphic, alphabetlike markings on 24 small canvases in evolving shades from red to coral. Far from Martin-Gilly’s conceptualism is Cuban artist Nieves Diaz-Lewis’s effusive schoolgirl psychedelia in which butterflies, sailboats and flower blossoms make her utopian landscapes feel as candy-coated as Willy Wonka dreamscapes.

Colombian-born artist Monika Ruiz works in a comparably intense color scheme to create abstracted botanicals with the Creamsicle oranges, yellows and greens of vintage Hawaiian fabric.

Though their styles are radically different, Marco Razo and Waldo Vinces’ paintings both feature literary asides written like footnotes onto their visual action. Razo’s beguiling figurative works feature vivid fresco hues, as in his “Self-Portrait with Crow” of the green pea soup-eyed artist whose vivid red skin nearly matches a background saturated with intense ruby color. Razo uses little snippets of text inscribed on his canvases to invest his images with personality and attitude.

Vinces’ equally quirky landscapes seem to render a life of the mind onto paper, depicting travel, longing and restlessness in his tiny sailboats adrift in an abstract landscape where words like “my home,” “sky” and “goal” have been imprinted like some emotional roadmap.

Amid Puntos de Vista’s juicy colors, Vinces’ intriguing mix of bold hues and flat, chalky grays give a palpable sense of a life shaped by equal parts sunshine and clouds, joy and disappointment.

Puntos de Vista: Five Latin American Artists in Atlanta runs through March 21 at ArtWalk at Lenox Square, Peachtree and Lenox roads. Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m.- 9 p.m., Sun., noon-6 p.m. 770-435-5180.