Javier Arizabalo | Cristina

A painting can be descriptive, or informal and not have the characteristics of a poem. It is a language of relationship of forms, which we associate with concepts and images, just as with words.

Any work, depending on the context, can lead us to a thought: would we pick up a white-bound book to read if we saw it displayed on a shelf? Surely out of curiosity we would open it, but yes, we have preferences. As viewers we sometimes need that theme with which we agree.

Our brain has the plasticity to believe or create realities, we can watch a black and white movie from the mid-20th century and enter the context. This in art means that we can interpret a black and white drawing as realistic. If we think that we must represent “reality” in full color, we must have a designed color palette, but as, for example, Anders Zorn's limited palette teaches us, with four shades we can give that sensation.

Without light there is no vision. I learned that tonality is more important than color to give the sensation of volume, space and dimension. Color is dependent on this, and on the reflective capacities of the different materials, of the different wavelengths that make up white light.

Probably the ancient painters gave a more important value to light, since they were more limited and aware of what it was to have a good light, they did not have all the artificial light sources that we have now, and we consider natural.

The painter must reflect on what light is, the points of light, its characteristics, whether it is punctual or diffuse, its color temperature.

Being aware about light has helped me with photography, design and drawing.

My works are the materially fixed moments that I spend with them, from the moment I act alongside what is represented, when I take a photograph, until the execution of the painting in a concentrated manner.

History is a discourse over time, and the minimum unit of that history is like an atom and its particles stopped in a moment, that instant, that minimum unit in time, exists from our position as an observer and does not need to be justified, the element exists and the observer observes.

At all times I believe in the wonder that is reality, perceiving it, analyzing it, and I am sure that at some point, someone, in front of one of my works, will give it an interpretation.

Beauty is not something tangible and much less eternal, but changing, it is mediated by an ideology at a social level and by judgment and sensitivity at a particular level, but yes, my works are imbued with an idea that reality is beautiful. Seeing and feeling is a gift in a positive sense, except when one suffers and is not in harmony with the world, and fixation on pictorial matter is a desire, sometimes vain, to eternalize that beauty.

–Javier Arizabalo