Water, is taught by thirst.

Land—by the Oceans passed.

Transport—by throe—

Peace—by its battles told—

Love, by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the Snow.

Emily Dickinson

Chechu Álava’s painting plays with time, codes and boundaries. She makes past, present and future coexist, expressing the legacies of art history with a contemporary brush, as if inhabited by what has already been done. She takes the pictorial path of vagueness to formulate emotions with rare precision, and, by probing the depths of each individual, draws a universal human portrait that links the intimate to the collective narrative.

Depicted with the utmost delicacy, the flesh of the bodies reveals the souls that animate them, and their fragile, Balthusian beauty embodies an unsettling strength.

Held up to those who contemplate them like mirrors, the Spanish artist’s fascinating paintings are peopled by essentially female figures, whose gaze seems as much to pierce others as to lose themselves in an inner dream. Like matryoshkas, they interweave the artist’s personal life, references to the great masters, to personalities who marked their era and to feminism.

These multiple layers are physically reflected on the surface of the canvases. Through a slow process, guided by a modified state of consciousness and something akin to transcendence – “driven by paint”, she says – Álava works in oil through transparency. She lets each layer dry before covering it with a new one, giving the material a vaporous fluidity akin to a dream. For Chechu, reality is not a matter of straight lines, but of intuition. A beautiful painting is “neither a good idea, nor a good technique, nor both at the same time”. It is a gesture of love, an inner journey that results from a series of accidents leading from one place to another; it escapes its creator to live its own existence and, like music, allows itself to be interpreted by the vision and sensibility of its viewers.

Borrowing its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Water is taught by thirst”, the exhibition presents the artist’s six most recent works. Less obviously linked to historical figures, the narrative has taken a more autobiographical turn. The weft, however, remains woven from the threads of sensuality and spirituality, which constantly bring us back to ourselves.

Irène Languin