Gabriel Zea

Gabriel Zea is a Colombian painter drawn to the elegance of the human form and its ability to reflect on our personal history.

 

His work displays a preoccupation with the technical narrative of figurative painting, his focus has always been on creating with paint a representation of a contemporary mindset as influenced by our media-saturated culture. In devoting himself to recreating someone else’s attributes, Gabriel feels that he’s able to meditate on their personality as a reflection of his. Through both consistent observation and introspection, he can make both their vulnerabilities evident on the surface of their figure. 

 

By using various elements of pattern, abstraction, and an obsessive rendering of figures, the artist attempts to intuitively emote a common frame of mind that contemporary people experience.n his most recent compositions, the integration of moments are rendered monochromatically, as a means of magnifying the symbolic power of a single colour, and also in an attempt to simplify the images while giving them an iconic quality. This bold expressive application of colour combined with the controlled elegance of great draughtsmanship effectively imbues a sense of dream likeness to the works.

 

"I ask questions relating to the displacement of human desires into imaginary worlds, and I seek to honestly represent the viscitudes of our collective mental health. Born in Singapore to a Colombian family, and raised in a multicultural community in Houston, TX, my artwork has always reflected a desire to find a calm interior livelihood despite an outside world that is frequently in flux."

G. Zea