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JESUS MARI LAZKANO (born 1960, in Bergara) is a Spanish Basque painter. He graduated in fine arts from the University of the Basque Country and has had exhibitions in Europe, America and Asia. Jesus Mari Lazkano works in successive series linking architecture and landscape. Professor of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country. PHD in 1994 by the Basque Country University. His painting is part of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum collection.

 

During the month of June (2017) he has immersed himself in an Arctic Expedition by The Arctic Circle New York Foundation alongside scientists, filmmakers and artists, in order to explore theextreme landscapes from a sublime point of view. 

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Furthermore, after exhibiting a one man show at the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao as well as at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, he has performed at the Smithsonian Folk Festival (2016), in Washington, followed by a big retrospective at the Kursaal in San Sebastian. He showed his paintings in solo exhibitions in USA, China, Switzerland, Italy, Indonesia and Spain.

 

Recently, the publishing house NEREA has published a complete monograph about his paintings.

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A brief tour of the series: 

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Arctic (2017-2018)

Rests on my drawing table the map of my last trip to the Svalbard archipelago. Islands between latitudes 81º - 76º 13’ North and Longitudes 09º- 29º East, very close to the geographic North Pole, where re living more polar bears than permanent inhabitants and are trapped between ice for much of the year. An old map of worn paper, that stops being geographical and happens to become mental cartography, painting and drawing territory, a new and exciting space for the imagination.

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From architecture to nature 2006−2012

It is a work generated from the experience at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao and exposed in the same place. The museum like a creative space. Museum space itself as a generator of images. Interferences of history and stories, weather, and its products, building new and old, interference and enhancement. How to look at it looks. How to represent the spaces of presentation. The picture within a picture, the museum inside the box, the museum within the museum. How an artist reads and interprets the works, the space that presents the works and how it represents the presentation ... The Imaginary Museum. But the museum is just a scenario that takes place the evidence of a transformative process, a transfer of interests, from architecture to nature. The architecture is open, multiply the windows, the crystals disappear, cleared the wall and the border between architecture and nature is blurred, diluted. Nature is taking positions and occupying the architecture works of art as mediation.

 

Ars imaginis 2001−2006

Ars imaginis, which in its Latin translation encompasses the concepts of image, appearance and performance and in this case the idea of echo. The painting shows thematically referred to powerful well known architecture. Talk about the survival and reinterpretation of projects still charged with new meanings. These modern icons are only an excuse, the epidermis, which hides the real reason for my work in painting, that is, recover reality, learn to look carefully and listen to the echoes of time from the contemporary. Resonances that speak of places and art of architecture built from the differences. Echoes that resonate and take us to a natural geometry, a latent order which articulates the architecture as presented.

 

Ars fragmentaria 1998−2001

The work presented in this series summarizes around a project on the Italian world and sense of space and time. Part of a feedback cycle, the beginning is in the range of Renaissance gardens in 1995, abstract spaces and geometries impossible, natural utopian forms..... Concentric circles open and self-referential series including the series about the Pantheon, the Roman veduti, or pictorial meeting in Rome and New York, all projects that have been showing in Rome, in an attempt to regain that sense of contemplation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, giving rise to a city only possible in painting, a unique way to recognize and explore the city, to find a city waiting, your drawing is completed and a light that changes and reconstructs the away and returned to us in time, eternal time, like that of Rome.

 

Natural order 1994−1998

Nature reserves locked in the conservatory lead to the aesthetics of the garden like a paradise recreated space, possible construction of a miniature world, building the nature, gardening, rearranging ... This series integrates different stylistic solutions garden throughout history, with pictorial approaches at different times. Gardens of times and locations technical front also representing different times and areas. A French garden with a cool Egyptian, a Renaissance garden in front of a Pompeian fresco, the English landscape garden accompanied by a Persian miniature. Mixing times and places, gardens and plastic responses, order and chaos, control and openness natural style.

 

The great utopia 1992

The interest in certain architecture engineering such as bridges, depots, stations, etc., Drifts of building the greenhouse, as a perfect solution of form and function, including time and demand technology program. Built spaces for light and temperature, light and heat adjustable container winter gardens of paradise out of place. Mechanical space, functional spaces won a game between a decontextualized nature, wild, tropical and cloistered, overcome and deceived by engineering.

 

Tempus 1990−1992

The history of architecture and engineering phases of a time as it escapes. Viennese Secession, the New York utopian, a timeless tension broken dreams and impossible projects. Looking back to project the future, immersed in dreams, in its ruins. The attempted control of the territory for your needs, go farther, go faster, climb higher...

 

New York 1989−1990

The modern city as a backdrop, decorated petrified where time stops or accelerates. A town in the hills and from the heights, a city suspended in the forties, black and white, united through their bridges with reality. Bridges over the East River as a triumph over Nature and the impossible. City outside of time, without people, desolate, distant, like a document than it ever was. Berenice Abbott memories and photographs. Look at the city through its artists.

 

From the beautiful to the useful 1984−1988

As if everything was over, where there is nothing dark, almost hopeless, and emerge the ruins of industrial buildings rescued from around the estuary of Bilbao, fragments of buildings representing the strength and energy of modernity and progress, engineer majestic architecture, cyclopean, out of scale, destroying everything, imposed on a post-human landscape. In a reverse process, Nature is taking over them, integrating them into an apocalyptic scene in desolate landscapes and complex, with uncertain future and forgotten past. A reading of Caspar David Friedrich from Bilbao.