Spanish artist Prudencio Irazábal’s intensely luminescent artworks can give the impression of being somehow magically lit from within. Currently on view at Majorca’s Galería Pelaires in “The Grammar of Extension,” Irazábal’s most recent acrylic-on-wood works are dexterous—and mystifying—unions of light and color. 

The radiating colors of these canvases appear, in effect, not fixed, but fluctuating, as though one were looking at the surface of a precious stone. Decades ago, the artist experimented with a process of taking microscopic photographs of his paintings’ surfaces. He’d analyze the images, making observations about the materials he used and their effects.

From this search, he developed a process that allowed him to stratify his application of paint in translucent layers, allowing light to permeate the surface of the paintings down to the white canvas.

Prudencio Irazabal, Untitled 4R1 (2020). Courtesy of Galería Pelaires.

These recent works, while visually alluring, also possess an emotional poignancy. The artist started this new series in 2020 and aimed to create surfaces that captured something of the intimacy of the human body.

“How do we feel a surface that is beyond the reach of vision and touch?” the artist asks in a text accompanying the exhibition. Here, his semi-translucent layers hint, like muscles below the skin, at an interconnected network that gives life to the surface. 

See image from the  “Grammar of Extension” below. 

Installation view of “Grammar of Extension,” 2021. Courtesy of Galería Pelaires.

Installation view of “Grammar of Extension,” 2021. Courtesy of Galería Pelaires.

Installation view of “Grammar of Extension,” 2021. Courtesy of Galería Pelaires.

“Grammar of Extension” is on view at Galería Pelaires through March 10, 2021.