ALBA SUAU

For the past few years, Alba Suau’s work has been focused on approaching painting not merely as a static image, but rather as an event. Whether through painting or installations, she aims to live and share the tangible experience of the present. Continuing with this objective, two years ago, Alba embarked on a project where she translated her experience of a place through painting. Strolling, walking without a specific objective, marks the inception of her process.

Alba is a true flâneur. Victor Fournel, in his work “Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris” (“What One Sees in the Streets of Paris”, 1867), dedicated a chapter to “the art of the stroll.” Anaïs Bazin noted that “the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur.” Honoré de Balzac described it as “a feast for the eyes.” Sainte-Beuve observed that flânerie “is anything but being inactive.” For Fournel, this recreational wandering is a way to comprehend the complexity and richness of the landscape. This aimless drifting, without a defined goal, without expecting anything in return, is how the artist learns to better understand the space, to discover new aspects that she hadn’t seen before. But the walks conclude, leaving behind the memory of those experiences. This is what she paints.

In wandering, in moments of inactivity, a different reality is unveiled. This reality isn’t accessible through any activity, through any action. In the Baudelairean sense, the artist becomes a poet who immerses and contemplates. It’s the flashbacks of this contemplation that later nourish the creation of a topography based on memory, recollections, and lived sensations. Whether it’s a golf course in Brussels or an estate with irrigation channels in Mallorca, the places she has worked with so far existed independently of her paintings. However, in the series she is presenting at Alzueta, this dynamic shifts. The paintings no longer rely on a specific place; instead, a new terrain emerges on the canvas. The responsibility thus falls on the painting itself, enabling the artist to approach the material in a more liberated manner.

In Entre casa María y la mía, her first presentation at Alzueta Gallery, Alba Suau returns to using oil and dry pastel as tools to create tension on the canvas; the paintings are fluid and textured, with layers intertwining, blending, and conversing with each other. The specificities observed in her past walks converge onto a single canvas; the initial choice of colors derives from the landscape—the cement of the irrigation canals, the dark soil settling on them, and the still and flowing water. These neutral hues contrast with saturated and artificial colors, which, though they may not occupy the largest physical space, facilitate the conjunction of the existing elements. This marks the beginning; the rest emerges not from a concrete reality but from her own relationship with the canvas.

Through each work, an invitation to exploration opens up. Each line is a step, a footprint yet without the shape of a sole. Invited to wander through her forms, the artist creates a new version of each lived landscape through the filter that is her memory, serving as a cataclysm to incite one’s own interpretation at the same time that she endows the canvases with their own character. With a certainly hedonistic side, we recover the lost mysticism of the figure of the passer-by, by Alba’s side, who holds our hand and invites us to take a simple walk together.