Eduardo Sarabia
Istanbul, 2021
Oil on linen
185 x 255 x 4.5 cm
Eduardo Sarabia presents a recent series of paintings that feature everyday images covered with daubs of colored paint. The images appear to be family snapshots of vacations or past gatherings with friends, yet the subject matter is obscured and unreadable due to the overlay of color. Some time ago, Sarabia decided to repurpose personal photos he had lying around his studio and began to use the prints to mix colors while he drew or painted, or to practice his strokes before he took the brush to his works.
What remained on these prints were thick bursts of colors shaped into circular blobs by varying painterly gestures. Functional more so than intentionally improvisational, the compositions of covered portraits and landscapes became messy experiments similar to the sloppy notes in a writer’s journal; they were bits of ideas, incomplete thoughts—attempts to achieve something.
Despite their erasure, you were made aware that hidden among these blotches were resolved images that
someone behind a lens had captured.
Hundreds of these small photos piled up in Sarabia’s studio over time and became the perfect metaphor for the central tension of his practice, later to be transformed into formal paintings.