Galeria Senda presents Preludio, Aryz’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, dominated by large- format oil paintings that engage in dialogue with the classical painters who have influenced his career.

For more than a decade, Octavi Arrizabalaga — Aryz (Palo Alto, California, 1988) has traced one of the most unique cartographies of contemporary urban art. With Preludio, the artist consolidates a new phase in which his imagination opens up to dialogue with the tradition of painting.

Since 2019, Aryz has decided to shift his practice and reduce his mural production in order to retreat to his studio in Cardedeu. This change has allowed him to delve deeper into easel painting, exploring the painter’s craft and the wealth of its technical possibilities with greater freedom.

The exhibition continues the path initiated with Pugna (Paris, Nancy, and Rouen, 2019) and Vestigio (Prague, 2024), reaffirming its commitment to a painting rich in historical references, visual layers and textures.

The works brought together in Preludio function as pictorial collages, where fragments of art history coexist with contemporary gestures. From Van Eyck to Rubens, from Manet to Koons, the references do not appear as literal quotations, but rather dissolve into a language of their own; free and critical. Particularly striking is the piece Los galeristas (2023–2024), a large-scale oil painting that evokes Slim Aarons’s colour photography and his glamorous portraits of elites, reinterpreted here with subtle irony.

Far from nostalgia or mimesis, Aryz appropriates the pictorial language in order to question it from within, opening a threshold towards yet unexplored territories. The title of the exhibition is not chosen at random: this prelude does not announce an ending, but a beginning. A painting which, by looking back, finds new ways to move forward.