The flight of the lark of Mario Bencastro

Abstract

In addition to his literary inventiveness, the author´s experience as a painter is also combined in this intriguing novel in order to offer the readership a “pictorial fiction” where art and reality converge to shape a hallucinating world.
Marc Douanier, an art expert, is sent to San Salvador by a Parisian auctioneer with the purpose of purchasing the work of a local artist that has been internationally qualified as a “master expression of the fantastic realism of the new world” and it´s being sought after by well-known art galleries, museums and private collections that rapidly increase its money value.
To accomplish his mission, the art expert has to avoid odd situations like falsified and stolen pieces of art, and the work of secret sects that make his task even more difficult. On top of that, the home country of the artist is undergoing a political and social convulsion that reminds him of the historic French Revolution, which happened to affect deeply his own land centuries ago.
Marc Douanier has a special assignment: buying a painting by the Salvadorian artist to be included in the collection of the Louvre Museum, nonetheless, he first has to solve a mystery: why are the paintings blank? where have the characters gone? are they running away from their canvas prison to follow the people who struggle to break free from an oppressive system?
Benjamín Cañas´motto “I paint reality the way I imagine it” is painting these pages and his pictorial characters turn to life in the walls of this novel. “Benjamín Cañas was a virtuoso, an unprecedented reflexive painter who left a legacy to the Latin American art and the world.”--Bélgica Rodríguez, Director for the Museo de Arte de las Américas, Washington, D.C., EUA, (1988-1994).