Halfway between photography and painting, Urzay uses oil as if it were a microscopic photograph, creating an imaginary and intangible territory.

Darío Urzay trained at the School of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, initially within the confines of hyperrealism. However, after travelling to London and New York he evolved towards abstraction though always maintaining an indexical element that evokes reality.

For Urzay art is not a tool to express his inner life but a means of adapting himself to the world he lives in. In his works, predicated on dynamic balance and constant movement, he reveals his interest in human knowledge, geography, biology, chemistry and computer programming, in a constant search where nothing is definitive.

Darío Urzay works in series which he develops over prolonged periods of time, often for many years.

This oil on canvas from 1989, Untitled I, is part of his series London which he started working on while at the Delfina Studios Foundation in London during that year, and which he continued until 1991, when he was already in New York.

In this series we find references to the world of nature documentaries. This period is when Urzay’s painting begins to dematerialise and large fingerprints and swirls of painterly stains like the blobs of colour on a painter’s palette start to appear.

The work seems to represent city lights at night as seen through a rainy window. Urzay uses highly diluted pigments on which he works with broad brushstrokes with little paint so as to make a mark with the brush while leaving glimpses of the more diluted base of the paint. Apart from providing texture, this technique enables him to create enigmatic spaces in which the forms are blurred and out of focus. These imprecise elements are combined with more material forms to create a depth that tempts the gaze to go further, towards an infinite, nonexistent background.

The results of this technique are very similar to that of out-of-focus photography, which forecloses a clear view of what is being depicted yet allows us to intuit a certain relationship with reality, even if it does not exist.