Como La Flor
Javier López & Fer Frances Gallery. Madrid, Spain. 2021.
This third solo exhibition by artist Eduardo Sarabia (Los Angeles, 1976) expands on a conversation initiated with his earlier shows Intrahistorias (2019) and Expediciones (2020), now shifting its focus to his recent pictorial investigations through a selection of new canvases and works on paper. In this latest body of work, Sarabia continues his reflections on the idea of the journey, only this time the notion of movement turns inward—an introspective impulse driven by a search for the familiar, the warmth of the everyday, the significance of the landscape, and a renewed connection to nature as a form of resistance to confinement and everything the pandemic has brought with it. Como la flor is dedicated to memory and affection.
This series of paintings—shown here for the first time—forms part of an ongoing conceptual project, perhaps his most vulnerable, personal, and intimate body of work to date. A key aspect of his practice stems from an interest in how we process information: how one thing can hold and encompass another, or how something can remain hidden in plain sight yet still be fully present, like an imprint. In the Tainted series, for example, faces appear obscured under layers of paint—an act of concealment that denies the viewer an image that has, paradoxically, been there all along. In Painted Memories, he enlarges small snapshots of friends and collaborators that were previously used as palettes; their figures dissolve into paint smudges, transforming them into resonant representations.
This approach begins with digitizing personal photographs—of friends, family, gatherings, and vacations—and translating them into large-scale works as a way to foreground the moment, the narrative, and the gesture. In these latest pieces, we glimpse beach scenes beneath clear skies, palm trees, cactus and other plants, a silhouette cut against the sunset… Portraits and landscapes that are or once were part of the artist’s life are interrupted by fragments of vibrant color, swirling clouds, spirals, and bursts of thick, visceral pigment that evoke another time, as they are connected to earlier works. The marks that inhabit each image once served as the palette for a different pictorial moment. Despite the erasure, one can still sense the everyday scenes beneath—images captured by someone on the other side of a camera lens, at once familiar and distant, recognizable and dreamlike, weaving together times, realities, and fictions.
Autobiographical references are suppressed or blurred. The distancing Sarabia adopts creates an open space for interpretation, inviting the viewer’s own perceptions and emotions. These are enigmatic, seductive, and striking works that appear abstract from afar and reveal a photorealistic technique up close, underscoring the importance of the act of painting itself. Often described as a remarkable storyteller, narrative is his raw material. Through his travels, he examines how our understanding of the world and the places we inhabit is constructed through both fact and fiction.
