EL OLVIDO QUE NOS HABITA

Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta

18.05.2023 - 01.07.2023

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Faithful to his commitment to realism, memory and inherent questions about human being, Sánchez Zabaleta once again immerses us, through the slow and meticulous rhythm of his painting, in those territories of the emotional where the spectator, the silent protagonist, penetrates, oblivious to time, into the introspections and drifts of existence, seeing his soul unfold before this God who sees everything and does nothing.

“El olvido que nos habita” (The oblivion that inhabits us) is the painter’s new attempt to take us to his ground, placing us in front of a mirror with the slight pulse of an inhospitable landscape, of an empty table, or of an indeterminate space as a background, on which he places the nature that he perceives is vanished in front of us with the intention of stopping us in our tracks and giving us the space for contemplation and reflection in a frontal gaze. It happens that life goes at a gallop, that everything is so ephemeral that there is hardly any space left to stop and look. We have been inoculated with the seed of the new and therefore forgetting seems necessary. Today, revisiting the past is pertinent because it is the only thing that can make us feel that something holds us to life, that we are somewhat better, that we have come a long way.

“Almería has become the epicenter of my life in the last three years. I have travelled periodically to the east of Andalusia in search of the emptiness of the absent land and there I was”.

“More than my own life, I love the places that speak to me, the places that tell me in private the story that no longer tells, the places that represent the oblivion that inhabits us”.

“I see myself in the studio safe from everything, protected by the paintings that emerge little by little on paths that one opens and travels through”.

“I went to Almería because I felt that there were things to talk about there. Telling its story made me leave the studio in search of the mute witnesses that the remains, the ruins without memory, represent”.

J. Sánchez Zabaleta