Public University of Navarre, 1993

City and nature, two of the lines along which the work of Salaberri lies, are united in this picture. The city as the urban environment that grows and builds the everyday landscape where we live, and nature as the benchmark we must not lose sight of, in that idea of the painter of a curative nature, to which he resorts to rest his eyes and get rid of the weight of civilization. The foreground of this picture takes us directly to the buildings of the Public University of Navarre, to the network of the university complex, consisting of roads and buildings. But then Salaberri takes his hand, and with it the viewer’s eye, to the silhouette of a city that is outlined in the distance together with the always identifiable mountains that surround Pamplona. Two planes are thus presented with its light —intensity and elements— that could be two different works that merge into a single one. Somehow, the underlying idea of the spaces of the soul reappears, those that the brush outlines and evokes but does not delimit; and of the spaces in the outside world, already defined and drawn on the canvas. Salaberri paints what he lives, lives what he paints and that ultimately means an approach to the subject, in this case to the landscape, that he needs to travel and get to know before capturing, so that it then lies on the canvas as a reconstruction of what has already been experienced. Therefore, this and most of his landscapes, be they urban or nature, can be at the same time real and dreamt, simple or highly complex, rational and poetic. This work of Salaberri shows his intention of synthesising: an endeavour —attained— to discern the essential from the superficial; something that has been demonstrated over the years in his painting, in the same way that, in life, as one matures, one comes to value the essential. And that is why he keeps the drawn or silhouetted shape and the colour, always nuanced by the light that changes every day, every hour, every season, defining different landscapes from the same real image. The sun between clouds, the sunset, the city that little by little becomes silent, without stridency; static scenes that acquire movement thanks precisely to the incidence of the passage of time, like this look at a sunset at the University.
Alicia Ezker Calvo