Joseba’s oil paintings are beautifully painful. An omnipresent sense of restricted pain willing to go out through those plastic deformities. Are they monsters? Aftermath landscapes? Visceral still life?
This Bilbaino (Basque Country) focuses on what “used to be” applying colour layer after layer to rigid & organic structures. Lonely buildings, lonely giants looking at us from an uncertain horizon clearly differentiating heaven and earth… or hell we must add.
Thick, rich, heavy compositions of disgusting human waste playing with our senses and maybe trying to create a rarefied atmosphere. When do all this events take place?
The stage in front of us seems to be uninhabited and send us towards our own anxiety. If what we are looking at is the debris, it is because we have necessarily arrived after the happening of what happened, i.e. in a future. In a skinned, flayed, fleshless bony future (deprived of its flesh). Once again, some sort of relationship with privileged baroque places, beyond vanities, places that were ruins and also the library. Places that set in present time hold each one likewise their part of memory and their part of future melted and cast together (fundidos) as well as mixed up (confundidos). I.e. the dream of this image as given to us, is given as a premonitory dream, and being some sort of foreboding, the fundamental fear of which I have talked before takes the rudder helm fast in its hands again, till it is evacuated, thinned down and spread out over the painted surface. Once and again. (text by Juan Mendizabal)
His flickr page is a bloody rude goldmine, and so is his Saatchi Online profile where he’s one of the week’s selected artists.
