Julia Diazdel can’t see the sea or the garden of her home in Málaga from Madrid. But memory persists. Through her brushstrokes and an unmistakable color palette, the artist invites us to contemplate with her that Mediterranean landscape she misses so much.

Her work often moves between painting and conceptual art, such as pieces that combine visual language and text, between poetry and visual art. Nature and the plant world play a prominent role, using organic forms with intense colors. She also explores the everyday, domestic objects or common situations that she transforms into something symbolic. In her landscapes, she doesn’t seek to depict a geographical place, but rather a mental or symbolic one, using highly stylized plants with sometimes unnatural colors. These plants with exaggerated, almost imaginary leaves are reminiscent of jungles or gardens, and the intensely contrasting colors evoke the tropics. Her composition gives a sense of density and plays with the absence of realistic perspective. Thus, her landscapes are more introspective, a mental space for contemplation.

She uses gouache in her works, which focus on plant motifs, employing vibrant and saturated colors that evoke jungle landscapes, or taking the everyday into the introspective realm and using metaphors. Therefore, her work does not have a single interpretation, and this depends heavily on the viewer and their perception. The very nature of gouache allows her to create highly saturated and matte colors, which creates defined shapes, strong contrasts between figures and background, and clean areas of color.

Julia Diazdel is a contemporary Spanish artist, born in 1994, primarily associated with the Málaga art scene. Her work combines painting, objects, installations, and poetic elements, exploring the relationship between the visual and the conceptual. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Málaga and has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions since a young age, including “Metafísica doméstica” (2016), her first solo exhibition, and her participation in the group exhibition “9 Fugas” (2017).