Jesús Mari Lazkano studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, where he also earned his PhD and has taught painting since 1985. He began exhibiting in the 1980s, holding numerous shows and spending long periods in cities like New York, Chicago, Dallas and Rome. Behind the realism of his paintings lies a strong Surrealist component that occasionally reminds us of Magritte, as well as a hint of the Romantic mystery found in Friedrich's German landscapes. The places he chooses to paint suggest melancholy, empty spaces, often viewed from unconventional perspectives, which faithfully continue the Renaissance tradition of painting the "illusion" of a world on the other side of the frame. His works are characterised by clearly defined forms, painstaking detail, a differentiated use of light and rich tonal ranges of colour.

A staunch advocate of painting as opposed to technological media, Lazkano has never hesitated to fall back on pictorial tradition and openly declares his admiration for the Italian Renaissance. His painting reflects his own keen, thoughtful gaze, depicting nature scenes, architectural structures and cities that really exist but have been passed through a kind of poetic filter. Greenhouses, abandoned industrial buildings, old or modern architecture... his landscapes and buildings have a certain ambiguity and sense of strangeness, of emptiness, like the frozen squares of the Italian metaphysical painters. His pictures are entirely devoid of figures, whether permanent residents or transient travellers.

En eterna multiplicación [In Eternal Multiplication] was painted during his time in Rome as a grantee of the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts. Ancient Rome and Pompeii became inexhaustible sources of formal inspiration and cultural ties. Lazkano painted a domus or Roman house on what seems to be a magnified scale, and chose a completely frontal perspective that lets us see all the way to the domestic space at the very back, the courtyard. The impluvium on the floor of the first room—a tank for collecting rainwater—mirrors the rectangular hole in the ceiling directly above, a luminous opening framed by four columns. With a cold palette of blues, greens and mauves, the painter underscores the linearity of the forms according to a properly constructed perspective. The composition sets the central square, in which the depth of the room is recreated, atop a larger plane painted like a fresco with architectural motifs borrowed from Pompeian painting. The picture strikes up a dialogue between the powerful vertical lines of the pillar shafts and doorways and the diagonal and horizontal lines of the rooms leading to the vanishing point, as well as the cold highlights and shadowy areas that create a melancholy light. The absence of ornamental details and figures makes for a pristine vision of the clean, harmonious lines of this patrician residence, undoubtedly a place for memory and imagination. [Carmen Bernárdez]