Iker Serrano's paintings

Before he decides what to paint, Iker Serrano needs to sit down and work out why he is painting and what for. He is not dealing with direct or merely experiential expression; nor does he speak of the referentiality of the metalanguage whose starting point is art history itself. He is not even looking for a reflection of a sum of virtuoso skills that overcome the difficulties of the depicted. Far from using the easy complacency of seduction, he believes that art involves an intellectual rather than a physical effort. And to this end he rummages in the world of texts and creates a narrative full of metaphors in which he brings in a number of references from theoreticians and writers that stand at the basis of the project. Thus "Journey and Island" requires a conscientious preliminary work that is neither pedantic nor culturalist. Out of the figurative quotes and borrowings, he creates notions, makes plans, organises and selects motifs. He wants to integrate the background of his searches and emphasise them by generating traces and sequences. Without the work being left static or beneath the dominion of craft, he assumes the aesthetics of the sublime and the nuance of the ridiculous. As he explains very well with his quote from Conrad, he speaks of what there is in art of a heroic journey and also of how clumsy it can be if one does not take into account the artist's personal cultivation. It is a journey in which the author stands opposite the things, but also has to foster a re-encounter with himself and immerse himself in the depths of the motifs.

The artist is someone who is always alert and lying in wait. Rather than pleasing or displeasing, he seeks to interrogate and interest with the preoccupation to be seen in each work. It is a type of creation that investigates the nature of art. Placing himself beyond the anecdote, he expresses notions that speak of the creator figure. These are winding paths where he uses allegory in the modern sense, in which anything can serve to signify something different. There is no longer a dictionary that controls meaning, but a free creative adventure. There is a game of mirrors that protects the making and projects on itself all sorts of effects of that which passes by its side.

From an attentive review of the work, one can see that Iker Serrano's pictorial homeland is not too far from a romantic feeling and an ecological latency of coexistence with nature, a separate beauty that contains something of serene expression and also something of graphic scribbling — not only the total conjunction between the parts, but also the confirmation of uniting the different. He lives the country of knowledge, he stands before the learnt and challenges the conventions, proposing another dimension of things.

He paints a world in which the dreams and the description of the real occur almost seamlessly. There is something of his personal memories in this country with its mountains and streams. It is an intimate and subjective landscape that is waiting both to be discovered and to unfurl enigmas that will allow one to travel from today to yesterday, one in which there is always something life-saving. Just like a child left at home alone, petrified with fear, the artist discovers the calls of the jungle in a corner and no longer trembles, because he expresses himself, reads and acts plasticly. Above all, he tries to answer what it is to create and to be an artist. A way of questioning himself that allows him to continue working.

The pictorial footprint is fenced in by the limits of the frame and it forms windows. A thing arrives and another is left behind. As Juan Ramón Jiménez said, "art can be very quick, on the condition that it is very slow". Duration and extension are terms that are expressed jointly. Sometimes, the figure is the single, timeless protagonist. There are icy subjects that are accentuated by the use of the absence of backgrounds. They are characters or objects that appear to be located nowhere. The realism with which he depicts them makes the absence of their location all the more patent.

In another, the background acts as a counterpoint and locates more precisely that which occurs before one's eyes. It appears to illustrate the story of his own novel, with bright but cold colours. A penetrating spotlight lights the night scenes, creating new spaces that divert the gaze of the characters and give the scenes a halo of absence. At the beginning only a certain something can be known. Later, the set allows a more complex reality to be discerned. He uses natural resources such as water, clearings in the wood and the plants inhabited by heroes and myths from very different times. Combining fiction and experience, motifs that visit very different borders: the stone-like ice and the woody damp; the Nordic world and the seabed; islands and continents; a panorama in which the shelters of igloos and tents emerge for the most extreme exercises in survival. They are temporary studies of what occurs around and within the depths of the ego. A synthesis that shows the possibilities of an artist searching in extreme places. He is both an adventurer in search of the unprecedented and a researcher, carrying out a painstaking analysis. By way of curious situations, the result is a fable whose construction is both mental and sensitive. A return to the foreground of the most personalised pictorial figuration, as a way out to escape from the ostracism to which new technologies want to condemn painting.

Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea