Christian Labansky

Lives and works in Tudela, Navarra, Spain

Artist statement

I make oil paintings and large-scale drawings populated by bodies, animals, heads, crowds, and architectural forms. I treat these figures as bodies attempting to constitute themselves under pressure. Their identities and boundaries remain unstable: a head grows another head because the accumulated pressures of the picture demand it; an animal becomes a vehicle; several figures consolidate into a single organism. They consume, support, carry, worship, and transform one another, producing scenes in which bodily life assumes a ceremonial or mythic dimension. Before dedicating myself to painting full time (2022–present), I worked as an engineer, and I retain an engineer’s tendency to approach each composition as a systems-design problem. Every form exerts pressure on the other forms, and every alteration changes the behaviour of the whole. A single painting may develop over months through meticulous cycles of layering, scraping, erasure, and repainting. I use simplified contours, compressed spaces, abrupt changes of scale, and dense areas of colour to organize these competing forces into a provisional structure. The process is highly considered, but I want stupidity, damage, and irresolution to remain active within it. My recent work has become larger, denser, and more compositionally complex. I am developing paintings that operate as complete environments, in which each figure has an individual presence while also functioning as part of a larger metabolic system. Through...

Artwork