José Antonio Sistiaga is one of the most multifaceted contemporary Basque artists. Throughout his career he has passionately engaged in interdisciplinary projects that have taken his work through an ongoing process of renewal in the field of abstraction. In consequence, his work has evolved towards a language in which the contours gradually vanish in favour of a more powerful presence of colour, light, movement and gesture. Since the early stages of his career, Sistiaga has defended the creation of an entirely free and individual art, in which, fighting against impositions of all kinds, what ultimately prevails is the artist’s experimentation and creativity.

In the Paris of the 1950s Sistiaga had found his main source of inspiration in nature and in natural phenomena. His works attempted to unveil the essential forms concealed in landscapes, something which explains the references to landscape contained in many of his works, be it the landscape of the Basque country or from an interior garden. As this work from 1971, titled Paisaje vasco actual [Present-day Basque Landscape], demonstrates, Sistiaga does not represent landscape but rather he reinterprets it in a highly personal, free and experimental way.

Using colour but above else gesture, though still calm and restrained, he recreates the forms and energy implicit in the landscape of his native land. Through his work, Sistiaga explores the dynamic possibilities of painting, something clearly patent in this particular work, in which a number of loose brushstrokes harmoniously flow and slide across the canvas surface, recreating the craggy topography of the Basque Country. This brushwork which would become looser in the late sixties after Sistiaga began to engage with , gradually evolved until reaching a total explosion of colour; a colour which, as if propelled by a centrifugal force, seems to explode before the eyes of the beholder.

José Antonio Sistiaga is one of the most unique artists of twentieth-century Basque art. At a moment when the region’s art scene seemed stagnant, he championed a renewal of art and culture and set in motion an experimental teaching method based on the creativity of the individual. He applied that very same reflection to his own works through a purely gestural and energetic abstraction based on the use of colour as a means to unveil the forms and phenomena from the cosmos and nature.