ARTTYCO TALKS
For Aitor Etxeberria, painting is a threshold between memory and matter. He explores fragility as presence, the ephemeral as atmosphere, and invites viewers into a space where perception is always in flux.
ARTTYCO TALKS | November 26, 2025.
EPISODE #18: AITOR ETXEBERRIA
1. Your paintings often evoke blurred memories and fleeting perceptions. How do you translate something as intangible as memory into a material form on canvas?
A: Memory never appears as a fixed image, but as something that transforms each time we try to capture it in a painting or sculpture. In my process, I try to embrace the casual and the unexpected, allowing the painting not to be a faithful representation but rather a trace, an atmosphere.
I work with overlapping layers, transparencies, and veils that move between what we remember and what we forget. I am more interested in suggesting than in showing letting texture and color invite the viewer to complete, with their own experience, what for me begins as a diffuse memory.
In this way, the canvas becomes a terrain where the intangible finds form, though always open and in transformation.
2. You describe painting as a space “between the evocative and the ephemeral.” What does this liminal space mean to you, and how do you attempt to sustain it within a work?
A: That liminal space is, for me, the ground where the work breathes. The evocative belongs to the inner world: that which awakens sensations, memories, or emotions in the observer.
The ephemeral, on the other hand, is what slips away, what can never be fully retained. When I speak of an “in-between,” I mean that moment where both dimensions coexist, what suggests and what dissolves.
In my painting I try to sustain that fragile state by working with unfinished gestures, transparencies, or veils of color that seem to appear and disappear depending on the gaze. I don’t aim to fix anything concrete, but rather to keep open a space where the image is always in transit, as if it could shift before the viewer’s eyes.
3. In recent years, you have expanded your practice into sculpture, from arte povera materials to monumental works in corten steel, cement, and bronze. How does this shift from the atmospheric to the corporeal influence your way of thinking about permanence?
A: Moving from painting to sculpture allowed me to discover another way of dialoguing with time. Painting gave me a way to explore the atmospheric, the unattainable, while sculpture confronts me with materiality with the weight and permanence of bodies in space.
Working with ephemeral arte povera materials brought me closer to fragility and transience, almost as if they were memories embodied in fragile objects. In contrast, steel, cement, and bronze have forced me to think in larger scales, in the monumental, in what endures and projects itself toward the future.
This tension between what dissolves and what remains fascinates me: it allows me to understand permanence not as something absolute, but as an echo, a continuity that is always tied to the possibility of disappearing. Within that back-and-forth, the work gains its own life, reminding us that matter too is vulnerable, even when it tries to endure.
4. Atmosphere and surface seem central to your practice. Veils, transparencies, and dissolutions. What role does process play in creating this sense of the evanescent?
A: It is within the process that the evanescent emerges. I work with layers that accumulate and erase, with veils that sometimes cover and at other times reveal what lies beneath.
This insistence on superimposing and undoing is not a decorative gesture, but a way of accepting that the image is never definitive it always remains in transit, like a breath.
Each transparency, each layer, is the trace of a time that has passed over the canvas. I am interested in the work retaining those marks of construction and loss, in not hiding what was removed or altered.
In this way, the process itself becomes the atmosphere of the painting its way of containing the ephemeral without fixing it, as if the surface were at once presence and disappearance.
5. Whether in painting or sculpture, your work seeks a dialogue with fragility. How do you hope the viewer experiences this fragility when standing before one of your works?
A: For me, fragility is not only a condition or an ingredient that my work must have—it is also an experience I want the viewer to feel. In front of a painting, fragility can appear as something that escapes the eye: veils that dissolve, strokes that seem to erase themselves at the very moment they are recognized.
In sculpture, by contrast, fragility is manifested in the tension between the weight of the material and the precariousness of the form, as if something solid could shatter or fade away.
I am interested in the viewer, when standing before the work, feeling that their gaze also participates—that the work invites them into a relationship of care and almost intimate attention.
