As a child growing up in Bilbao, Spain, one of Joseba Eskubi's earliest and most formative experiences was painting with oils. His father, also a painter, introduced the young artist to the tactile pleasure of pushing rich pigment across the surface of a canvas—an intensely sensory experience that became permanently imprinted on the young artist's imagination and spirit. As he matured and decided to dedicate his life to painting, Eskubi's creative trajectory has been shaped by a sustained dialogue between art history, formal economy, and personal memory. "I think it would be difficult for me to do without painting," says the Spanish artist. "It's an experience that reconstructs my contact with the world; it intensifies it." Unbound by naturalistic representation, his dreamlike, atmospheric environments—ranging from softly luminous landscapes to turbulent seas—are constructed through the expressive possibilities of paint itself.

In Phasma, his second solo exhibition with MPM Gallery, the artist presents a selection of recent paintings that further demonstrate his evocative Baroque sensibility and masterful command of classical light. Eskubi's bulbous, plasmatic forms exist as primordial organisms in perpetual transformation, slowly adapting to terrestrial environments in a continual process of evolutionary mutation. Orifices emerge, eyes and mouths are born, and we witness a succession of transfigurations that gradually assume the forms of bizarre sea creatures and birdlike demigods. They lift themselves into expanses of lushly brushed air and radiant light that evoke something strangely familiar—as if recalling a shared, ancestral memory.

Eskubi's practice unfolds along a delicate boundary where entropy intersects with beauty, and where the sinister gives way to moments of unexpected tenderness. At the heart of his paintings lies a carefully calibrated tension: grotesque, unsettling forms are rendered with extraordinary sensitivity, producing images that are at once disquieting and deeply seductive. Hovering between the primordial and the mythic, the corporeal and the spiritual, his paintings invite viewers into a world where transformation is perpetual, identity remains in constant flux, and the origins of life are imagined not as fixed events, but as an endless process of becoming.