Intimate Geographies
The Sea, the Seas: belonging to anyone, to entire peoples. From lone sea dog to seafaring hosts, the Sea’s rolling waves and mighty tides rock human silence and civilising clamour alike. Beneath the influence of lunar dreams forever unfulfilled, yet also the scene of long, already written tales, in perpetual movement even when proferring a mirage of calm, its liquid soul beats with the tension of contradictions. Iratxe Caño Esteban embraces the paradoxical – the only affirmation poets can acknowledge – and where the long tradition of painters of the Sea and the Seas offer horizontal compositions that rhyme with the horizon, the painter born on Cantabrian shores and settled on those of the Mediterranean has chosen vertical perspectives. Thus Vertical Seas presents an invitation brimming with challenge: used to the safety of shapes, in the realm of fluids we are gratified only by what contains them. Yet what contains the Sea, the Seas, is not a handful of rocks risen to the surface – in origin, by the bye, also part of a magmatic and primitive sea-, but vision: theirs, yours, ours. Let’s look at it, then, let’s really look at it and we’ll see that it’s always, whether green, grey, black or blue, simply an immense, shifting, sparkling self-portrait made of dark, unfathomable chasms and surfaces bejewelled with infinite reflections.
Pere Parramon, professor and art critic