THE SOCIOPOLITICS OF THE SYMBOL IN EDUARDO SARABIA, AT VETA
By Álvaro de Benito
The Madrid gallery VETA by Fer Frances hosts a double exhibition of Eduardo Sarabia’s (Los Angeles, U.S., 1976) work, made up of the series Mi gente and, complementarily, La luz. The production of the Los Angeles–born artist, who has lived for years in Guadalajara, Mexico, moves between traditional artisanal techniques and the most contemporary procedures of sculpture and installation and, above all—as is the case here—painting.
In this proposal, Sarabia presents that intermediate vision between the real and the imagined in which he often feels sheltered, almost always stemming from personal experience. This biographical element frames a series of parallel readings of political and social character. Mi gente rises as a paradigm of the artist’s pictorial work: a series of large- and medium-format portraits in which the familiar figure—people important in his close circle—disappears behind the traces of artifice and the visual trickery into which painting turns when it imitates large oil stains.
This technique, in which areas are applied regularly onto the canvas, is one of the most recognizable hallmarks of part of his production. Nevertheless, Sarabia has been using this procedure for more than fifteen years, and in Mi gente it acquires a more intimate and suggestive idiosyncrasy. Behind the figurative lies a reading of the current problem of immigration in his country of birth, a sociopolitical period of special relevance that he observes with concern and that blossoms in this series under his brush and what the portrait conceals.
Accompanying Mi gente, under the collective title La luz, are a series of small-format paintings and two handwoven tapestries, one of which was previously exhibited in the gallery within the conceptual framework of the group show The Fire Keepers, co-curated by the artist himself. All the works presented in this framework stem from a more intimate working process and are limited to the representation of motifs that recur throughout Sarabia’s production.
Eduardo Sarabia. Mi gente and La luz can be seen until November 8 at VETA by Fer Frances, Antoñita Jiménez, 31, Madrid (Spain).
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