Light in the Darkness

I am not entirely sure how Ochoa selects the films he watches, but it is evident that he seeks something different from the deafening emptiness that is often offered to us. His black-and-white landscapes bring to mind auteur cinema cycles, those small screening rooms where directors like Angelopoulos, Wenders, or Tarkovsky amazed us with frames of such otherworldly beauty. The dimly lit atmosphere helped us immerse ourselves in those desolately beautiful vistas, paradoxically luminous and dark at the same time.

The works presented here provoke similar sensations. On one hand, through a series of small pieces on acetate paper—one of his most common mediums—that inevitably suggest, in their longitudinal arrangement, the reading of a sequence of film frames, an impossible storyboard in its narrative heterogeneity. On the other hand, through larger canvases that exhibit a classic duality: a nature of immeasurable dimensions, and architecture or figures indicating human presence and action. These latter elements, drawing from past masters, add motifs of long-standing tradition: boats on the sand, anonymous characters making their way to a hermitage in the mountains, physical combat as a symbol of inner struggle.

In proceeding this way, Ochoa invites the viewer to draw out the deeper message of the works, but also, if desired, to introduce their own meanings and reinterpret them through their personal journey. Some titles lead us to fairly specific references, while others remain much more open, deliberately ambiguous. Although It Is Night undoubtedly alludes to Saint John of the Cross, but also to Enrique Morente or Rosalía. In front of his works, we also find Evelyn Waugh, Caspar David Friedrich, the Book of Psalms, or the Coen brothers. For Ochoa, a trusting conversation with a personal and providential God serves as the inspiration for this project, which announces a new stage in his work—a stage where change is as significant as continuity.

In this way, the artist’s journey toward a deeper exploration of the essence of his work becomes evident. He is evolving from gazes at the sublimity of nature toward a contemplation of transcendence—a path already implicit in his earlier works, but now more accessible for those who wish to traverse it, to whatever extent they desire. The invitation remains to observe carefully, to suspend time before these images—even though their origins may be cinematic. Let us forget their fleeting original condition and view them as traces of something grand and enduring, or if we wish, of Someone. We would not be far off.

Finally, since the formal is not at odds with the conceptual, it is worth considering how material and technical precision is key to the meditative wonder his works provoke. Walkers carrying lanterns at night beside the dark silhouette of a temple outlined against an unlit sky; a symphony in black, an almost velvety blue darkness; forms constructed through imperceptible layers of pigment polished to achieve a surface so smooth it could be mistaken for photographic. Our senses pause, suspended before a landscape as realistic as it is dreamlike, where painting once again performs the miracle of materializing the spiritual.

I predict that Ochoa still has much to push us to look outward, and inward as well.

Jorge Sebastián Lozano