Cristóbal Gabarrón

His painting, charged with symbolism, is full of insinuating forms that arouse a sense of anxiety in us. His works encourage us to try to decipher a message full of ambiguity and double meanings, which the painter shows us in many provocative images. Above all the ones –the majority of his work– related to the human figure, with the body in different poses. His bodies strive to express a plurality of ideas, a variety of emotional states, a torrent of rational or irrational thoughts, so that in all this process the form and the flesh are metamorphosed, changed, altered, revealing new internal elements. Thus we can understand the body represented by Gabarrón as a complex entity not structured and unified as in earlier decades but now besieged by scientific advances regarding artificial intelligence, genetics, cloning, new technologies and a long list of other examples of technico-scientific progress. This new anatomic model has lost its nature and ingenuity, and even its finite nature because of this new phase of scientific expansion that has generated a “posthuman” culture. In this exhibition jointly held by the Chelsea Art Museum of New York and the IVAM we discover in these parameters Gabarrón’s figures constantly driven by an inner force, arising from a volatile exterior, which form a weft of formal symbolic representations that could be the embryo of a new being.