Reed rafts

Better known as “Rafts on Titicaca, Puno”, this oil painting is part of a series of landscape studies focusing on this part of southern Peru, produced by Jorge Vinatea Reinoso from 1928 to 1929. The artist was impressed by the beauty of the high plains, and in this work we see a group of rafts on Lake Titicaca, and the city of Puno on the opposite shore.
While the artist has represented in composite fashion a number of elements, he has at the same time selected them in a careful and readily identifiable manner. All the figures in the scene are dressed in typical costume, and there are no allusions to modern life. In this way, he shows us a city that seems frozen in the past, in a time associated with the cathedral that stands tall in the background. But at the same time, he suggests to us the existence of a traditional Andean world, in which the landscape of the Andes and its inhabitants are fused organically.