For Costa Rican sculptor Heiner Guido, wood is much more than the raw material he uses to create captivating works of art. It’s a communication medium — something solid and immobile that speaks to him before being brought to life through his imagination.

As the header text on Guido’s website conveys, “The wood itself has its own language, its color, its texture, the years lost in silence disintegrating in the forest, combined with the hands of the sculptor and faith.”

On a separate web page, Heiner elaborates on the role that faith — intermixed with talent and technique — plays in his artistic process. 

“So in order to be able to create in a free and determined way, in addition to accumulating technical knowledge, anatomy, composition, drawing, I am strengthening my faith. With faith, we can see things that have not happened yet, and work without seeing anything, but with the certainty of what will happen.” 

Similarly, belief is the “fuel of creation” that enables Guido to embrace every artistic challenge. 

“You can’t create anything if you don’t first believe it can be done,” he says. “Many of us want something that we’re sure we won’t have. But how is something going to come into your life that you’re sure you won’t have?”

Guido recalls a pivotal point in his career when he reflected on the early years as the first step. The next door, he anticipated, would prove if he was “a dreamer” or had the capacity to test his technique and composition to the maximum. 

“Reproducing reality is one thing, but I seek to draw reality from an emotional point of view, to do things not as I see them, but as I feel them.”

With each new piece of wood Heiner finds in nature, he envisions a way to express its unique personality in the resulting work of art. He describes himself as “a sculptor who communicates the sensations of shapes and feelings through wood in the process of disintegration — that is, roots, hollow trunks, branches, attacked by time, rain and insects of nature, giving each piece a unique character.” 

After studying plastic arts at Costa Rica’s Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje (INA), Guido began his career in 2008 as an independent sculptor. The same year, he entered pieces in his first collective exhibition at the San José National Gallery, and had works accepted by some art galleries. He went on to become increasingly prominent, nationally and internationally, as an entrant in various exhibitions and art fairs. In 2020, he was selected by the Albaro Noboa museum in Guayaquil Ecuador to represent Costa Rica in the El amor sculpture biennial.