Costa Rica's ecological masks.

• Author: Murphy-Larronde, Suzanne

Earlier this year, Melvin Gonzalez Rojas and Neftali Rojas Morales visited south-western Florida and brought along a sampling of the Central American tropics in their suitcases. The two Borucan Indians, both gifted artists, were invited to attend part of a six-week exhibition at Sarasota's Marie Selby Botanical Gardens to showcase the exquisitely crafted, three-dimensional rain-forest masks that they and fellow master carvers create on a remote indigenous reserve in southern Costa Rica.

Borucan mask-making pre-dates the Spanish Conquest and the diabolical balsa wood or cedar versions devised in its wake still play an important role in the cathartic annual celebration, El Juego de Los Diablitos, a stylized, three-day battle against "European invaders" in which the Indians emerge victorious. But Gonzalez Rojas, a twenty-seven-year-old with shiny black hair caught loosely in a pony tail, remembers when plastic Halloween masks from the capital of San Jose began replacing the event's original handmade ones. His father, seventy-five-year-old master carver Ismael Gonzalez Lazaro, took note of the change as well and set out to revive interest in the craft by imparting the tricks of his trade to a dozen young school boys.

Decades later, most of the original apprentices are still at it, including Gonzalez Rojas, who, two years into his fledgling career at age ten, chalked up his first sale and has been successfully carving, painting, and selling his masterful creations ever since.

Classes with San Jose painters Ana Banientos and her husband, Fernando Paramo, in the mid-1990s introduced the young men to contemporary painting techniques, which they quickly fused with traditional carving methods and a developing concern for the region's endangered rain forest, located an hour's walk from the village. Inspired by Gonzalez Lazaro, whose designs often incorporate a few native animals, the younger carvers began filling their work with growing numbers of brightly colored jungle flora and fauna, usually clustered around the coffee-colored face of a Borucan shaman or forest protector. The new hybrids were an immediate hit with buyers and the "mascara ecologica," or ecological mask, part paean to Mother Nature...