Iris Sanmartin Dalmau

Contemporary Figurative Oil Painting of a Female Figure by Iris Sanmartin

2024

Iris Sanmartín Dalmau (Barcelona, 1996) studied Illustration and Self-Publishing at Escola Francesca Bonnemaison before graduating with a Higher Technical Degree in Plastic Arts and Design, specializing in Applied Arts, from Escola Massana. She is currently completing a degree in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, a field that informs the reflective and symbolic dimensions of her artistic practice. Working primarily through painting, Sanmartín Dalmau develops an intimate visual language rooted in autobiographical experience, exploring the subtle intersections between daily life, memory, and the mytho-poetic structures that underlie personal narratives. Her work often emerges from fragments of lived experience, transforming ordinary moments into emotionally charged and symbolic compositions. Central to her practice is a process of gesture, erasure, and reconstruction. Through the use of diluted oil paint, layered glazes, cloth, and sandpaper, she builds and removes images repeatedly, allowing traces, absences, and imperfections to become active elements within the composition. This method generates atmospheres that oscillate between appearance and disappearance, clarity and ambiguity. Her paintings draw from notebooks, personal writings, archival photographs, literary references, and recurring motifs related to the body, intimacy, desire, and memory. Figures, animals, and organic forms often inhabit dreamlike spaces where tenderness and strangeness coexist. Through this layered and process-based approach, Sanmartín Dalmau examines how emotional experience becomes embedded in the spaces and images that surround us, revealing the hidden narratives and psychological resonances contained within everyday life.