Carlos Arriaga

CARLOS ARRIAGA (Madrid, 1958).
"Ambushed Metropolis # 5", 2025.
Oil on canvas. Photo grisaille and resin on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner. Titled and dated on the back.
Measurements: 97,5 x 147 cm.
Carlos Arriaga, professional photographer and painter, received most of his artistic training in New York. He studied photography and cinematography, as well as drawing and painting at the Arts Students League in New York, and at the Arauco Foundation in Madrid under the direction of Guillermo Muñoz Vera. Since 1980 he has collaborated as a professional photographer with prestigious advertising agencies and with the best national fashion and general magazines. His works were exhibited at Affordable Art Fair (Brussels, 2019, 2014), at Cartel Gallery in Malaga and Pepe Pisa Gallery in Madrid, among others. Arriaga was awarded in the XIV Concurso de Artes Plásticas Carlos de Haes (Madrid, 1996), CXIX Salón de Otoño (Madrid, 2002), XXV Premio BMW de Pintura (Madrid, 2010).
In 2015 a change occurs in his career, for it is when he experiments with the technique of oil painting on black and white photography, which will become his artistic signature. This technique alludes to grisaille, the monochrome painting technique, which mimics the effect of bas-reliefs. It was very common among medieval Flemish painters, and became fashionable in the rest of Europe around the 14th century. As a professional photographer, Arriaga captures the photographic landscapes with his camera. He then subjects them to a meticulous study, and modifies them, doing the work of urban planners to create a perfect megapolis.
These contemporary grisaille and reinterpreted by Carlos Arriaga, invite us to a dreamlike journey through Madrid, but a different and non-existent Madrid in our dimension. The perspective that the painter offers us on his city, allows us to capture the ephemeral moment of contemplating the capital from its best perspective: the sky. The dichotomies of this urban landscape, taken out of the temporal context, since it has neither sun nor moon, are very attractive: the urban and the wild, the trees versus the stones, the apocalypse versus the birth. The only thing that remains constant, and that makes us part of this hermetic microcosm, is ourselves, fruits of this uncontrollable wild nature. Carlos Arriaga invites us to a flight to the fourth parallel dimension, to "The Creation of the World" in the Boschian way, so that once and for all we can find the balance developing our urban lives.