The exhibition “Depósito Rafael Zabaleta” gathers together works of art, which the Castaño Lasaosa-Zabaleta family has given in deposit to Artium Álava.
Thirty-six artworks make up this deposit, ten of which were created by artists such as Joan Barberá and Pedro Bueno, all closely related to painter Zabaleta. Pedro Bueno was Zabaleta's friend since their student years, when they held long artistic tertulias in the Madrid coffee shops. Among the paintings that shape this deposit we may enjoy a portrait of Zabaleta himself. We may admire as well ceramics by Antonio Cumella, and art pieces by Benjamín Palencia, Miquel Villáabassols and Pablo Picasso, whom Zabaleta met and started a friendship relationship during one of his trips to Paris in 1949. Picasso gave him a book of drawings and lithographs, which is included in the exhibition.
Zabaleta was a thin, bold, blue-eyed man with an observant though timid gaze. In his work he combines the rural and the universal, and shows country people under a certain mysticism by means of expressive colours, a centralised composition and a hieratic expression similar to that of the Byzantine Pantocrator.
The town of Quesada, in Jaén, watched Zabaleta's birth, traced his life and witnessed his death. Being the son of a well-positioned family, he is able to study the art of painting in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando, in Madrid. There he meets the avant-garde artists of his time while working on his academic nudes and landscapes. When he finishes his studies, he travels to Paris for four weeks, thus asserting his fascination for that city. During the Civil War he settles in Jaén where he collaborates with the Artistic Recuperation Service under the Republican Government of Baza and Guadix. During that time he draws pictures about the war that will later disappear when he is put in jail.
During the 40s, a new period in his painting begins. He lives in Quesada, though travels to Madrid very often. In the Biscosa Gallery of Madrid he exhibits his work as the only artist for the first time. It is then that Eugenio d'Ors develops an appreciation of his work and introduces it in the Catalonian Salón de los Once. During those years Zabaleta's painting becomes increasingly plain. Traits are simplified and colours grow vivid.
The last period in his artistic development takes place after his trip to Paris in 1949. It is during this period that he meets Picasso, who will have a visible influence in his work. Traits, which characterised his previous period become stronger: high contrast in colours, hard strokes, and hieratic figures. He provides his peasant characters with clear-cut shapes, which are outlined in black and thus define colours vividly.
There are some outstanding drawings in his work, such as the surrealist series “Los sueños de Quesada”. In these pieces his precise strokes lend both rhythm and strength to his composition by means of a simple though efficient combination of black and white colours.
Working with his brushes, Rafael Zabaleta brings out the common and the rural, projecting a fragmented and symbolic vision into his work. He enhances with originality the landscapes of the sierra, agricultural work and his own town instilling into its inhabitants an icon character. In his painting, time is detained in geometrical perfection, in black strokes that outline shapes and in peasant's deep gaze.