Untitled #767

Irazabal gained recognition in the mid-1990s with two exhibitions in New York. This was a particularly fecund time for young artists to revisit pure abstraction as a historical language of dubious continuing viability. Irazabal's paintings revel in a Pop-like pure gestalt visuality that makes them feel instantaneous and immediate. In his deep understanding of the language of painting as the result of a long, particular, and peculiar history, Irazabal has encoded conceptual signs of many eras of painting history into his works. These markers go back to the lost masterworks of the ancient Greeks and reference many of the styles and ideologies that have characterized the medium of paint since.

Irazabal's primary medium is a very runny liquid polymer, to which he adds first a gel medium to make it lie somewhat thicker during application, and then tiny amounts of liquid pigment to make different colors with various degrees of translucency. Given the thickness of every layer of paint that he applies, he builds box edges around the painting to keep the medium from running off the surface. The edges are removed before exhibition to allow the sides to be seen. When Irazabal puts colors on top of one another, the effect on the eye is incredibly complex.