Eduardo Sarabia
Hoja Elegante, 2021
In this new project, Sarabia continues to reflect on the journey, but here the travel is linked to a kind of introspection—a drive that relates to a search for the familiar, the warmth of the everyday, the importance of landscape, and reconnection with nature—as a form of resistance to lockdown and to everything that the pandemic has brought with it. Como la flor (Like the flower) is dedicated to memory and affection.
Ghost Town, 2020 (left) and High Lights, 2021 (right)
The autobiographical references are suppressed or veiled, and the distancing that Sarabia adopts allows for open interpretation by leaving space for the viewer’s perceptions and emotions. They are mysterious, seductive, and striking works, which seen from a distance tend towards abstraction and up close show a photorealist technique, thus emphasizing the importance of the pictorial exercise. Despite the erasure, the viewer can intuit the underlying everyday images captured by someone on the other side of a photographic lens, images that are at once familiar and alien, recognizable and oneiric, interweaving times, realities and fictions.
Lovely Day, 2021 (left) and H. M. Poolside, 2021 (right)
This practice starts with digitalizing personal photographs of friends, family, gatherings, and holidays, and enlarging them to emphasize the moment, the narrative, and the gesture. In these most recent works, we can distinguish beach scenes of clear skies, palm trees, cacti, and other plants, a silhouette outlined against the sunset... The portraits and landscapes that are or have been part of the artist’s life are interrupted by patches of vibrant colour, storm clouds, spirals and bursts of thickly applied, visceral colour, which in turn call to mind another time as they are linked to other works. The blotches that inhabit each image were the palette for another pictorial moment.