enrique zabala about

enrique zabala is represented by rosa.santos gallery

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Enrique Zabala.

Born in 1967, Valencia, Spain

Selected Solo Exhibitions.

1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2001. Postpos Gallery, Valencia, Spain

2004 Paintings. rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain.

2007 Las Vegas Series. rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain.

2009 Maldivas Series. rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain.

Selected Group exhibitions.

1988Interarte 88, Valencia. Stand de la Facultad de BB.AA.

1989ARCO 89. Madrid. Galería Postpos.

Interarte 89, Valencia. Galería Postpos.

Artual Gallery. Barcelona.

1990ARCO 90. Madrid. Galería Postpos.

Interarte 90, Valencia. Galería Postpos.

1991ARCO 91. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1992ARCO 92. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1994ARCO 94. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1995ARCO 95. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1995ARCO 96. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1997ARCO 97. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1998ARCO 98. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

Art a l'Hotel. Valencia. Postpos gallery. Spain.

1999ARCO 99. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

2000ARCO 2000. Madrid. Postpos gallery. Spain.

2005 Valencia art. Contemporary Art Fair rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain.

2006 Valencia art. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain.

2007 Valencia art. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery. Valencia. Spain

Arte Santander. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery, Santander, Spain.

Art Salamanca. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery, Salamanca, Spain.

Foro Sur, Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery ,Cáceres, Spain.

2008 Valencia Art, Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery, Valencia, Spain.

Arte Santander. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery Santander, Spain.

Art Salamanca. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery Salamanca, Spain

Foro Sur, Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery, Cáceres, Spain.

Art Lisboa. Contemporary Art Fair, rosa.santos Gallery Lisbon, Portugal.

SWAB Art Fair, Contemporary Art Fair, Barcelona, Spain.

2009Art Salamanca. Contemporary Art Fair, Salamanca, Spain.

Foro Sur, Contemporary Art Fair, Cáceres, Spain.

Valencia Art. Contemporary Art Fair, Valencia, Spain.

2010ARCO 2010. Madrid.

Foro Sur, Contemporary Art Fair, Cáceres, Spain.

Cartografías 100x100. Valencia.

Bienal Martínez Guerricabeitia. Valencia. Spain

Bienales Martínez Guerricabeitia, 1999-2010 (Adquisiciones)

Preview Art Fair. Berlin. Germany.

Las Vegas, Rangali Series. A Statement.

Las Vegas is surrounded by a bleak landscape—the Desert—where death is all that can be expected. In Rangali, in the Maldives, this immediate hostility is embodied by the Ocean. Both Las Vegas and Rangali are places where the most dangerous, risk-filled landscape directly borders the most favourable, pleasant environment, designed and built as a place where the vanquishing class can pay for peace of mind, for feeling protected and worry-free, for being without fears, while faced by the unfavourable, and in this case immediate, outer landscape.

Nothing to worry about, nothing to build, nothing to alter, nothing to fight against. Those who pay to cease being alert appear stunned, relaxed. They know they are safe in the eye of the hurricane. In the Maldives, this hurricane’s eye can only be grandiose. The landscape becomes an implausible optical effect by revealing itself as fully analogous to its graphic portrayals in the mass-media and in travel agency brochures. Those who return from a trip to the Maldives do not show any photos—What’s the use? We know the story. The images captured by visitors are a lesson or a demonstration: impossible to approach the subject other than as a post-card, as a photograph from a travel catalogue; no room for anything different, for improvisation or specific interventions; no hidden alleys or unexplored perspectives. Everything is given to us ready-made, definitive and predictable, already built and apparently indestructible. The number of focal points on the island, from which every “noteworthy site” can be seen, is limited and is conditioned by the system of roads and beaches. Nothing to translate, nothing to reformulate, a mirage. Both Rangali and Las Vegas are forgeries, ever-hated by those who miss the outdated criteria of authenticity.

In painting, realism is very easy, and so is the most extreme abstraction. I can reproduce anything, and I can do it very faithfully, as a camera would, avoiding any filter, any improvement or intervention. Despite their position as theoretical extremes, photo-realism and monochrome painting share a ceremonial taste for lethargy, for what is easy, for what doesn’t need to be interpreted or corrected, the mechanical, the industrial, for what turns us into a tool. In those two genres, both the process and the result can only be slushy and sticky, precise, gridded: we know it by heart, we have seen it ad nauseam. We could point to a certain continuity between mechanically painting a copy of a photograph and producing a flat monochrome surface. Two extremes that seem to converge.

I strap my camera around my shoulder, I let it hang by my hip, with a remote shutter release. I play the role of a neurotic, impotent prowler. This is Rangali. The Ocean is a few metres away, in the background, behind an artificial beach, strange and murky like the mossy marble slab of a grave. Here rises the extreme work of man, which feeds on men. There rises the primal landscape, devourer of men. Two extremes copulating. Like the tombstone and the grave. Through the camera lens, my character captures images analogous to those delivered by the ever-unexpected mirror on the column of a shopping mall; images of other bodies, or one’s body, this time immersed in the dialectics of the other, of the double. In those encounters, my character takes on the appearance of somebody who seeks to be liberated from initiative and anxiety, to surrender to the dominance of what is easy, and to be humiliated through the contemplation of the specific fragility of the sterile.

Each painting conceals a bomb behind its stretcher. That’s why I expect the viewer will not feel comfortable. It is not a game, it is not a question of finding anything that may lie in the painting. The paintings in the Maldives series speak the dangerous kitsch language characteristic of the taste of a certain social class. The members of this social class appear on the paintings, they will see themselves reflected like in a mirror, static, like effigies of themselves. The appear relaxed and happy, like a tragic summary. In some way, they don’t know what the non-happy think, their exclusiveness has taken them too far.

I have used two kinds of canvas in this series. One absorbs the paint more than the other, and the former lacks the dazzling white primer of the latter. The least absorbing one forces painting by jerky strokes, while the white primer makes the brush slide in a more flowing manner. I paint mechanically, like a brainless person. I invent games to stay alert, to keep my attention on the canvas during the painting process. I can paint and consider definitively finished some areas the size of a typing sheet of paper, that are far apart, while the rest of the canvas remains empty. I can make a grid on one or two canvases and pretend that I paint the pictures following a geometric pattern. I can paint the canvas like someone who writes a story, from left to right and from top to bottom. Anything to avoid the tremendous anxiety I feel from painting like a machine.

The videos that accompany my series set a course, that of rejecting the present, the course that protects us from our worst fears and makes us follow in the footprints of an uncertain order. My character carries out disciplined crossings, without needing to pause, without intending to penetrate the world, deliberately omitting crossroads and options. They are obsessive hikes, similar to those of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, or those of Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer. Animals without a way out, social corpses stripped of any prestige that run away from the need for action, thanks to an excessive task that places them far from turbulence. These strolls always border the danger zone, the Ocean, that no-man’s-land where a naked, persistent immersion would lead to death. The perimeter of Rangali Island can be walked in half an hour, like most of the Maldive Islands.

Enrique Zabala

Las Vegas- Rangali Series. 1000 words. A Statement.

Enrique Zabala. Living in Artifice. J L Perez Pont

Enrique Zabala. Living in artifice.

Political organisations and executive authorities appear to be incapable of understanding the full implications of the environmental issue as a whole. Even though they have recently started to become partially aware of the most conspicuous dangers which threaten the natural environment of our societies, they approach them from a technocratic perspective when, actually, what is needed is an ethico-political articulation–what Guattari calls ecosophy –between the three ecological registers: the environment, social relations and human subjectivity.

Individuals often feel incapable of taking part, in this world of extremes where distance and time are no longer an impediment. It is rather a question of will and power, but those who have the will to incorporate structural changes do not have easy access to positions of power. For, in order to move along that path, it is necessary to strike alliances that lead to the perpetuation of the very models of thought and non-action that are most profitable to the established system. Communication , an essential tool for society, has taken root in the politics of scandal as an inseparable part of the politics of the media, turning the use of scandals into the most efficient tool for political struggle. When the media “delivers” information about environmental disasters, it is not due to a direct concern about its consequences, but because there are other interests behind it that are part of a political strategy. This lack of “truth”, which is a product of partisan interests, results in the message failing to connect with the social conscience or with the population’s cultural substratum. In our country, in contrast with other nations within our geopolitical context, respect for the environment has not caught on among voters and, therefore, the major political parties have not regarded it as a main focus of their political agendas.

In recent decades we have gone from consumption to consumerism, with all the consequences this implies regarding the depletion of natural resources, the production of residues, and climate alterations. A kind of virus has led to the instability of desires, to insatiable needs and the resulting tendency towards instant consumerism and the instantaneous disposal of its components. This insatiable dynamic underlines the confusing course individuals take to direct their search of happiness, and at the same time it points to signs of atrophy in the exercise of their good judgement through an activity that may be described as a “collective escape from reality”.

The narrative of Enrique Zabala (Valencia, 1967) unfolds within this context through painless scenes which subtly condense a discourse that questions the prototype of standardised human behaviour, which is linked to exclusivity as a symptom of economic success and social status. Leisure, entertainment and tourism, turned into the pillars of the consumer economy, are portrayed in Zabala’s canvases. By using a resort in Rangali, in the Maldives, as a kind of research environment, and by applying photo-realist techniques as a method of representation, the artist shows the leaden scene of those who travel thousands of miles to escape from themselves, from the accelerated avalanche of everyday life. Those luxury tourist resorts are, by definition, a circular artifice from which the individual cannot escape, an extension of Western civilisation, a mirage where everything is the result of a carefully studied design. However, beyond their boundaries there is no guarantee for human life. Nature, understood as a postcard landscape, finds its utmost expression in these enclaves, losing all verisimilitude. Visitors go into a trance, a shock that leaves them with an absent stare and without any capability to react, overwhelmed by the scene as they adapt to the pace set for them, almost as if on doctor’s orders.

“Politics” and “democracy” are synonymous: by definition, the main objective of antidemocratic politics is, and always has been, depolitization, that is, the nonnegotiable demand that things “go back to normal”, that everyone go back to their place… In order to alter the established norms it would be necessary to re-politicise the economy , to force it to leave that depoliticised stage that has allowed it to become the fundamental fantasy of postmodern politics by succeeding in making it impossible to assign direct responsibilities in the chessboard of the global scene. Just like the ideal of responsibility (with what this means in terms of freedom, initiative and personal choice) implies the devaluation of dogmatic interventionist morals, it also reflects the erosion of the great representations of progress associated with either science, technology, revolutionary forces, the market or the State. Society no longer believes in any historical utopia, in any global solution or any deterministic law of progress. We have ceased to link the happiness of humankind to the development of science and technology, and moral improvement to the progress of knowledge. The ethics of responsibility emerge as a response to the collapse of the beliefs in the mechanist laws of the evolution of history. The nature that has to be protected is more a matter of survival and of personal quality of life than an unconditional ideal. If the status as an environmental citizen is accompanied by unprecedented obligations and rights, it is clearly the latter the ones that bestow on said status its true collective impulse. Under the shelter of those future obligations, we see the advancement of new demands regarding safety, the framework for life, the expansion of individual rights: the right to clean water, the right to forests and to an atmosphere free of pollution, the right to a non-disfigured natural environment. Behind the historical conquests of rights/freedoms and social rights, we see the development of claims to the right to quality of life, which is the very expression of postmodern individualism.

From the beginning, human development has been basing its growth potential on policies of exploitation of the environment, on devouring processes that consume themselves, against nature.

José Luis Pérez Pont