Repetir nunca é repetir (To repeat is never to repeat).

(Álvaro Siza, Imaginar a evidência [Imagining the evident])

Make Room is pleased to present Intervals of presence: pentimento y esperanza, Yoab Vera's second solo exhibition with the gallery since his LA debut in 2023. Bringing together a new suite of paintings, the exhibition gathers the motifs Vera has long returned to, the horizon, the sun, the seascape, the flower, and introduces a new one, an olive tree on the Turkish coast. Central to the exhibition are four ideas that have become interconnected in the artist's practice: the interval, presence, pentimento, and hope.

At the core of Vera's practice is the horizon. He places it before he knows what a painting will become, and the surface opens from there. Vera studied architecture before turning to painting, and his surfaces are built up as much as they are painted, with concrete and oil color worked into the canvas by hand and with sponges, rollers, spatulas, and sanders, the same horizontal gesture repeated from one edge to the other. He scrapes and reworks the surface, staying with the uncertainty and friction that come with change. The artist calls this pentimento, the Italian term for the trace of a painter's change of mind, and it was present in his work, he notes, long before he had the word for it. "The surface remembers," Vera says.

Color, for Vera, enters as memory. Rosa mexicano, pale yellow, turquoise, light blue, and deeper blues leaning toward pink return across the canvases, never twice in the same way. Their source is Coyoacán, whose façades, shadows, and sky gave the artist his earliest education in color, alongside the vivid colors and monumental forms of Mexican architecture, from Luis Barragán's arquitectura emocional to Ricardo Legorreta's bold geometries. Vera approaches a painting as architecture approaches a room, holding space around a feeling through proportion, scale, and color, and he has conceived each wall of the gallery as an interval between one return and the next.

The largest body of works in the exhibition, Semana serenata: intervals of presence (2025-2026), extends across seven canvases. The horizon line holds steady from end to end while the skies move through pale lavender, orange, turquoise, pink, periwinkle, and yellow. Vera conceived the sequence while watching sunsets over the Sea of Marmara from his studio window in Istanbul, and painted it in Mexico City. He held on to those moments of sustained looking beyond simply reproducing a literal view. Sunrise and sunset come back again and again in his work. They are the hours when you can watch time pass: the light changes slowly enough to follow, and then it is gone.

Pentimento carries its most physical weight in Daydreams: florece la esperanza (2026), paintings that each began as a seascape the artist could not resolve in the studio. He covered them in concrete primer and left them unfinished for a long period. Returning to them in Mexico, he painted each over in a single color and allowed a small floral image to surface at its center, like a niche or a retablo within the larger field. The hidden seascape persists, sensed at moments through color and at others through the resistance of the textured ground. In Scent of hope: pausa y suspiro [Pause and sigh] (2025-2026), five pink flowers with scratched stems stand in a gray-blue field, the stillness held inside a sigh.

Several titles come from Vera's reading of Byung-Chul Han's The scent of time, where he found a way of thinking about the horizon in time: the past remaining part of the present, the future open as possibility. In the Temporal horizons series (2026), on canvases of 130 x 180 cm, the line between sea and sky becomes that threshold. In Temporal horizons: florece la esperanza, the horizon leaves the sea for a field of flowers; florecer, in Spanish, holds blooming, blossoming, and flourishing at once.

The olive tree enters the work for the first time this year. In Gündoğan, a coastal town in Turkey where he works during the summers, Vera watched the early morning light arrive behind it and painted it as an act of record. In Scent of hope: meditar junto al olivo (2026), the same silhouette returns across four 30 x 30 cm panels against alternating fields of pink and blue, each return registering the season that has passed. Hope, for Vera, is a movement toward what is not yet here. "In the studio," he says, "it is as simple as returning to the canvas the next day."