For some time now I have not been able to see umbrellas as mere umbrellas.

I believe that there is something deeply mysterious and incomprehensible in our perception of objects.

The illogical coexistence of things. That is a paradox. For example: an umbrella is, in itself, a curious paradox; for although we think we are sheltered, it only protects us from the rain and yet we always end up wet. The umbrella we beg for when it starts to rain is of no use to us when the storm breaks. It simply makes us feel covered in the open.

I think I only paint images that narrate my sentimental heritage, that place of my own that haunts memories to recover them from the abandonment imposed by oblivion.

I also paint to heal the wounds I don’t want to forget.

Sometimes an image traps us like a spider's web. Its presence accompanies us imperceptibly in the labyrinth of our memories. And one day, without warning, it claims the limelight. It is a curious mechanism that always surprises me. It seems as if memories need a slow maceration before they become their own entity and only then, digested with sufficient time, can they exercise their specific function in our memory.

A fact: a real image of a real friend. It is the image of a man and his umbrella left together, orphaned, at the edge of a thick red puddle. The umbrella, open on the ground and swaying at the mercy of a relentless wind, foreshadows the definitive absence of the person lying next to it. It looks with its round face and points its single finger at all those who dare to look. And it seems that the drops slip down its canvas like tears.

And I one day, later on, paint an open umbrella to speak of that absence. I discover that it is a metaphor and a tribute.

‘Memoria’. Jose Ibarrola. Mural. 200 × 600 cm. Centro Memorial de las Víctimas del Terrorismo, Vitoria (Basque Country, Spain).

Image provided by the author.

Jose Ibarrola (1955, Bilbao) is a Spanish visual artist. His work, which speaks for itself, is even better understood in connection with that of his father, the painter and sculptor Agustín Ibarrola (1930, Bilbao). Both have been persecuted by political violence from groups of different ideologies. Agustín was a political prisoner during Franco's regime because of his communist militancy. Both their work was later attacked by extreme right-wing terrorists, during the dictatorship, and by ETA and its entourage, radical Basque nationalism, during the democratic period. Bodyguards accompanied the family for years.

In 2000, Jose Ibarrola learned through television of the murder of the family friend Jose Luis López de Lacalle at the hands of ETA. He had also been a political prisoner of Franco's regime due to his left-wing militancy. In the footage, an open red umbrella lay next to the lifeless body of the victim. Was it his or had someone placed it there to shelter him from the rain that poured down that morning? What is the point—thought the artist—of protecting him now when we had not done so when it was possible? Following his assassination, graffiti appeared in his village, Andoain, reading ‘Jose Luis de Lacalle jódete’ (Jose Luis de Lacalle, fuck you). Sometime later Jose Ibarrola would create his series ‘Memory and Umbrellas’ to speak about objects, images, remembrance, absence, emotions, metaphors, and tribute. As the artist declares: painting, for him, is an exercise of memory.