"Cal" Painting

Raúl Lara is a contemporary figurative artist born in Morón de la Frontera, Spain, where he continues to live and work. His paintings explore human identity as something continuously shaped by experience and time: the distance between who we are and what we show to others, the presence of our past within us, and the parts of ourselves that remain hidden or unresolved.

His relationship with painting began in childhood, when he took traditional oil painting classes and spent much of his free time drawing. After a period away from painting, he returned to it at the age of 24, encouraged by his wife. For years he combined working in the family business with painting in the evenings. Largely self-taught, he developed his practice through sustained experimentation, personal research, and occasional courses and workshops.

An unexpected milestone came in 2012: after his wife submitted his work to a competition without telling him, Lara was selected for his first public exhibition at Agora Gallery in New York. That experience helped open the way towards a full-time artistic career. His work has since been exhibited in cities including London and Paris and presented at START Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. His paintings have appeared on book covers published by Editorial Planeta, Rowohlt Verlag and Polity, and are held in private collections across Europe, the Americas and Oceania.

Lara describes his approach as Neophotorealism, a personal dialogue between traditional painting and image transfer. He usually begins by constructing or transforming images digitally, often combining and altering photographs, although a drawing, a painting or another kind of image can also serve as a starting point. The image changes again when transferred to canvas. By working with gesso, pressure and areas intentionally left untransferred, he influences what appears and what disappears. Other breaks and imperfections emerge unpredictably. For him, transferring an image is itself a way of painting, one in which control and chance coexist.

This process is closely connected to the ideas in his work. Black-and-white transferred images evoke the past, while painted passages of colour suggest the present. Fractures, missing areas and partially veiled figures can speak of earlier versions of ourselves and of what remains incomplete as we change. Mirrored, doubled and overlapping figures explore the contradictions and different facets of identity.