Ismael Sentíes

"Arde el umbral," by Ismael Sentíes, presents a selection of paintings and drawings created between 2023 and 2025. The pieces that make up this exhibition evoke mnemonic experiences that place the viewer before shattered atmospheres, where uncertainty denies easy exits. For Sentíes, the artistic act arises from the tension among the bodies involved: the body that paints, the body of the materials, and the body of what is represented. Each one poses constant challenges in pursuit of action. On this occasion, the works act as an assault on inertia, not only due to the artist’s positioning but also because of what the pieces declare about themselves. From an obsessive logic, Sentíes archives traces, shapes, and gestures that originate in memory, age within it, and eventually become visible in one or more of his compositions. In this process, the constant repetition of familiar forms plays a leading role, as the artist allows himself to alter and perfect recurring elements. This pictorial act, which might seem merely corporeal, in turn becomes an appearance: a portent. The journey through the exhibition invites the viewer to navigate gradients between a state of contemplation provoked by stillness and another triggered by a devastating event. In this threshold, what burns is the conversation between the recognizable and the concealed, between spontaneous gesture and the persistent echo of images that insist without fully defining themselves. "Arde el umbral" documents the moment when light turns into flame—like a spontaneous combustion that disrupts speculation. The burning cabin, far from being just a landscape, becomes autobiography painted with the pigments of a rupture; a declaration that reveals, in each stroke, the search for the event.  

 

cosa rapozo and Hernán González