IGARTUA AND THE INQUIRY INTO NATURE AS A LIVING BODY
Igartua presents a pictorial practice that investigates the relationship between the human and the natural through surfaces conceived as organic membranes. Within them, beauty and disorder are set in tension to reveal nature as an enveloping and transformative organism.
Enhorabuena Espacio presents Vigía, a solo exhibition by Esteban Igartua (Lima, Peru, 1974), in which the artist unfolds a predominantly painterly and graphic proposal that delves into the relationship between nature and the human body. His works configure the surface of the canvas as organic membranes, separating, revealing, or altering layers and thus alluding to a vital quality. Through this approach, he also highlights the tension of the chaotic, the vulnerable, and the unstable—conditions that are likewise intrinsic to life.
In Igartua’s proposal, the landscapes depicted in his paintings become territories capable of accommodating a syncretism between the human and the natural. His canvases take on qualities of a living being, of skin that ages or fissures, imagining bodies that converge and dissolve into space. His images reflect, in part, the fascination of the gaze before natural beauty and the fear of being unable to control it.
With theoretical roots in accounts of exploration and in the expeditions of the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the Peruvian artist brings together scientific and botanical tradition with artistic practice. The result is a visual language in which enigma and the desire to uncover what lies hidden converge within a natural environment that both shelters and engulfs the human.
Esteban Igartua. Vigía can be visited until March 20, 2026, at Enhorabuena Espacio, Olvido 24, Madrid (Spain).
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