Allegorical pictorial worlds full of riddles and clever contemporary criticism

Head resting on his hand, looking more resigned than thoughtful, a man, well dressed at least once upon a time, sits in front of a chessboard, seemingly pondering over his next move. The room, apparently in a once splendid building, is now ramshackle, abandoned to decay. The ceiling has partly collapsed, and only a potted plant and the chess player appear to remain as the last living traces of civilization. Only one move has been made on the chessboard. The opposing pieces are all still in their starting positions, and in any case no second person is recognizable as an opponent. Clearly, someone is playing a desperate game against his alter ego here, while the world around him continues to fall apart.

Painted in 2021, The Game is easy to read and yet difficult to fathom. Even the title is not much help. What game is being played here? The decline and the apparent desperation, rooted in a rigidity of movement that seems almost absurd in view of the circumstances, can almost be felt physically. It's hard to imagine what happens next, but the story of what led up to that moment would be interesting: how did the player get into this situation, and what invisible chains prevent him from freeing himself? These are questions that one might also ask about many pressing human issues, and so it is easy to understand when Unai Etxebarria explains that The Game was created as an allegory for the way people deal with climate change. Because here, too, according to Etxebarria, »There is a lot at stake and not much time left to act, either.«

A sharp observer of our times, Etxebarria comments critically in his pictures on how humans behave. He does this never in a coldly distanced way, but rather full of warmth and affection, with humor and irony – and his paintings never exclude himself, which helps them come across not as the judgements of a stern judge, but rather as the sometimes smiling, sometimes perplexed comments of a participant who always manages to look on from the outside at the imbroglios and confusion that we all stir up together. This view finds expression in his pictures, which reflect the themes of our time, artfully staged, translated into an allegorical stage set. While they appear perfectly coherent, they require unravelling; while they allow different readings, they do not prescribe the interpretation to the viewer, but rather demand his own interpretation.

He encounters the subjects for his motifs in everyday exchanges with the world – a headline, a photo, a news item or a conversation – »ideally accompanied by a good wine«, Etxebarria remarks. Like a conversation with a close friend – with or without wine, everyone can speculate for themselves – in which together they struck a sweeping great blow and took on everything that has gone wrong with the world. Moving briskly from one topic to the next, they knew how to criticize pointedly and worked out an all-encompassing picture of everything that was no longer acceptable. It was the big revolution, thoroughly in the subjunctive, cozily enthroned on the couch at home. But Etxebarria would not be the astute observer he is if he did not have a second reel of film from the observer's perspective. And so he is not only acutely aware of his role as »couch revolutionary«, but also of the fact that this role is not played exclusively by him, but rather plays out frequently in numerous living rooms. Altogether, it lends him a wonderful visual motif: The masked street fighter about to throw a Molotov cocktail from the warmth of his living room, the party balloons still floating in the air… The spectrum of readings is as broken as the composition, a biting critique full of smiling self-irony.

Born in 1968, Etxebarria started painting quite young and yet only came to it in a roundabout way. Even as a child he was interested in art history; he began drawing, worked with other materials, and expressed his creativity with his hands. At the age of 17, he went to work in the studio of a professional painter near his hometown of Bilbao, where he learned to paint with oils. On graduating from high school he considered studying art, but then decided on philosophy. Still, he kept drawing – with no professional aspirations, as he says – later painted in watercolors, and finally organized a first exhibition of his work. That, fortunately spurred him to take up oil painting once more. And he has stayed with it to this day.

Apart from his brief stay in the studio, Etxebarria, who now lives in the tranquil town of Rees in North Rhine-Westphalia, is a self-taught artist who develops the motifs of his paintings carefully. Starting from an idea that is often vague, he associatively researches images, models, and fragments, which come together in an initial sketch to form a rough composition. As he works the sketch up into a picture, the wrestling of content and form with each other is sometimes revealed; the composition is corrected, rebalanced, and superfluous elements are eliminated. The results are concentrated subjects, self-contained, of seductive aesthetics, which immediately challenge the viewer once he or she has been drawn into the picture. The scenes can be described forthrightly enough; but interpreting them calls for some work, creativity and imagination.

The dialog that Etxebarria prompts is not only with the viewers of his paintings, but also with earlier works from art history. His works repeatedly take up quotations, in a deep bow to the great masterpieces – but with a cheeky wink, too. And so, transposing Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase into the present, he has a mannequin walk down an escalator. Borrowing Manet's dead torero for a quartet reduced to a trio is his way of commenting on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on culture, which, like the fourth musician, has fallen into a deep sleep, waiting for life to reawaken. The remaining string players play on blindly, their heads hidden under a cloth – a metaphor for the cultural blindness that has seeped in everywhere under the »Lockdown measures«.

Etxebarria designs realistic depictions of irritating pictorial motifs, leaves traces and tempts us to follow them. If we do allow ourselves to follow them, we are setting out on a dangerous journey; for not only awareness lies in wait, but so too a confrontation with our inner »Couch revolutionary«. The pictures are metaphors rich with allusions and references, in an allegorical realism as a clever critique of the times. Important references for Etxebarria are artists such as Michaël Borremans, Justin Mortimer and Tim Eitel – a canon that his works complement quite appropriately, in his very own signature full of both seriousness and humor.