Behind the Canvas: Elena Vasquez on Emotional Abstraction

A Conversation with Elena Vasquez

We spoke with Elena Vasquez in her Madrid studio, where three large canvases in varying states of completion lean against the whitewashed walls. The room smells of linseed oil and turpentine. A Spanish summer light fills everything.

"I don't paint landscapes," she tells us, correcting a phrase from an earlier interview. "I paint the feeling of a landscape. There's a difference. I'm not interested in topography — I'm interested in the sensation of standing somewhere, of the air, of the particular quality of a heat that has its own colour."

The Sirocco Series

Her newest works, including the much-discussed Sirocco currently on display in our East Wing, began during a residency in the Tabernas Desert in Almería — Europe's only true desert. "I was there for six weeks in August. It was extreme. The wind, the dust, the quality of the light at midday — it was almost hallucinatory. I filled six sketchbooks, but almost none of it became painting directly. It needed to be digested. The work is always retrospective in a sense — it's painted from memory, not from observation."

This retrospective quality gives her paintings their dreamlike authority. They are not records of places but of states — of being in a place, of the way a landscape colonises the body.

On Process

Vasquez works in sessions of four to six hours, building the impasto surface through multiple applications, scraping back, reworking. "The painting tells you when it's finished. I've learned not to argue with it."

Sirocco and Lluvia de Luz are available to collect from our shop.