Will Gabaldón

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce the opening of Will Gabaldón: Leave all the windows open and Angelo Vasta: To Hold Myself. These exhibitions mark the San Francisco debuts of both artists and the first presentations of their work at Rebecca Camacho Presents.

Will Gabaldón’s intimately scaled oil paintings foreground the natural world. In varying shades of green offset by vibrantly colored skies, Gabaldón creates bucolic scenes based on personal memories of outdoor spaces fused with imagined scenarios. These quiet amalgamations bridge time and place. Blustery, windswept hillsides vibrating with lush trees offer a window onto a particular moment in time, and a number of works in the exhibition are simply titled Landscapes with the accompanying date. Painted in April, May, and June, August, and September 2024, these works are emblematic of Gabaldón’s iterative practice, highlight his investment in the genre of landscape painting, and his ongoing commitment to depicting the varying skyscapes that occur in a single day. For example, four paintings from August – Landscape (8/3/24), Landscape (8/16/24), Landscape (8/18/24), Landscape (8/20/24) – feature the colorful skies within a three-week span, moving from bright blue, to pink, hazy gray, and back to blue again.

Gabaldón is in step with other painters who devoted themselves to representing the subtle nuances of light at different points of the day and throughout the year by painting en plein air. Gabaldón, however, primarily works in the studio, producing paintings from memory and with a focused attention to form, composition, and technique. Each work incorporates carefully spaced objects rendered with thick passages of brushwork that add depth and texture to the surfaces while mimicking the dense swathes of grass and full, leafy treetops depicted therein. Notably, Gabaldón’s landscapes are wide open vistas, void of humans, animals or the built environment. As such, the viewer is given the opportunity to project themselves into his seemingly serene spaces. An alternative interpretation of these landscapes opens onto a more sinister read; that these are visualizations of what life on Earth would be like without humans, and what the world could look like after we are gone.

Opening reception Thursday 6 March, 6 to 8pm