Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Escalera al mar, 2021

Almería,

Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta tells, born in the Leonese town of Cistierna in 1970, that his early inclination for drawing had to do with his closest environment: his father was The artist From that town, his Mother teacher. His first painting prize – and so far unique, a very difficult circumstance to understand – obtained him being a child; He studied applied arts in Zaragoza and, from that moment, he has not stopped painting: first in Hondarribia, where he opened his first workshop at twenty years, and then choosing the field in Castile.

Self -taught and lonely in his work, and today resident in Gaucín, in the Serranía de Ronda, continues in his eagerness now looking south: In front of the studio window the world extends. Living between the clouds allows me to see and observe things with the distance necessary to be able to explain them in my paintings. The footprint, everyday time or memory are sufficient concepts to work a lifetime, and in those I am. In recent years Almería has also been the source of some of his compositions and is now the museum of contemporary Spanish realism. Murec, whose permanent collection is part, who dedicates an exhibition, “Almería. The absent land ”, after which galleries from Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Segovia, Amsterdam or Toulouse have already given him.

As visually powerful as markedly reflective, his work usually offers us abandoned, interior or exterior spaces, that someone could understand, in the light of today, as dystopic, but that do not stop transmitting humanity: the traces of their inhabitants are present, although We cannot know how much makes they left. Sometimes he focuses on everyday objects that makes the axis of Bodegones poetics and that seem to have remained, in their fabrics, suspended over time; Others bathe in ruins of a very characteristic light; It is a seal of the production of Zabaleta the handling of gray and their soft shadows. One of his referents has been Antonio López, also present in the Murec funds with other Madrid realists.

Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Lifting nature, 2024

The exhibition of this center, which today opens to the public and has been curated by Juan Manuel Martín Robles, consists of eighteen pieces of almeria inspiration, in the purely physical and in the atmospheres that evoke. They integrate a series, called The oblivion that inhabits usin which, always from those realistic postulates, has attended to landscapes, abandoned constructions and, again, everyday objects converted into manifestations of the Tempus fugitof the perishable of almost all subjects and silence and stillness that ends up wrapping what could be before bustling. Their creations continue to suggest desolation, absence and pause.

Not surprising Earth, in a vegetation never lush or in uninhabited constructions. In recent years, this author seems to have sought to transfer reflections on the meaning and implications of inhabiting a space, in a philosophical dimension that transcends only material. It is possible to appreciate their scenarios from aesthetics and symbolism, attending to the importance we grant to belonging and roots as basic needs, as well as that of a roof in its physical meaning.

Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Staircase to the sea, 2021

In Varada Church (2022) o Salinas. Lonja at five in the afternoon (2022), Zabaleta seems to accentuate the potentially symbolic in landscapes or memory that architecture can possess, while in Silence will be everything in our oblivion (2024), Still life (2024) o Roses for Isabel (2021) It becomes evident that the thematic reasons are tools to try to lead us to what is beyond the visible and towards silence, the usual non-subdidian of their compositions if we consider them synesthetic. Its ruins are not missing as lived spaces and current link with the past (Andalusian Cortijo Walls2021); Some of the titles of the images account for the approaches of this artist about our links to the environment, exalting almost the treatment of the passage of time: that Silence will be everything in our oblivion (2024).

Similarly, in their still lifes, balanced in the management of volumes and symmetries, characterized by the use of earth tones and the care of textures, the belongings are more than utensils: they acquire symbolic value in relation to the absent, emblems are made of nostalgia. Sánchez Zabaleta’s painting never gets to the description: I have not painted Almeria as we see it, but as I have felt: a place where the absence becomes the matter, where the colors are extracted from the life it was. In these works a yearning beats, a search that is lost between dust and light, as if Almería was not a territory, but a state of the soul.

Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Varada Church, 2022
Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Ruin of an Andalusian farmhouse, 2021

“Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta. Almería, the absent land “

Museum of contemporary Spanish realism. Murec

San Luis Paseo, s/n

Almería

From January 31 to March 30, 2025

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