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. Far from conceiving art as an instrument to express a personal inner experience, Urzay views it as a means of adapting to the world he lives in. In his tireless quest, the artist engages with all kinds of human knowledge, not just the humanities, but also geography, biology, chemistry and computer programming. His awareness that no knowledge is sufficient unto itself is what probably gives his works their dynamic balance and constant flux.

The artist’s output takes the form of overarching series, sometimes developed over several years, which can be placed somewhere between photography and painting. He treats oil paint as if it were a glazed, blurry snapshot in which something may be glimpsed but never truly comprehended. That is the case of Super Skin I & II, belonging to a suite Urzay began in 1989 after his arrival to New York and completed in 1991. In this work his painting dematerialises and the large and characteristic fingerprints alluding to the tactile, to the very skin of painting, appear. As in out-of-focus photos, Urzay employs a diffuse, fuzzy background in which the more intense and well-defined areas of orange seem to levitate over the surface.

The depth of skin is the object of the representation of this diptych. In the half-ochre, half-brown surface Darío Urzay renders the various layers of the epidermis. To this end, he employs transparencies and glazes, as did Titian (1477-1576) or Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). The artist synthesises that classic process by superimposing layers of diluted colour that take over the whole of the canvas. He thus establishes the three dematerialised levels of the skin: the first ground in a warm tone; a second painterly “film-skin” and, thirdly, shiny, nearly lacquered stains; on the left, the fingerprints are superimposed over the paint, while in the right section the rectangular forms seem to emerge from the layer of priming below.