For more than twenty years, Nicolás Combarro has built a body of work that likes to confront reality, in an approach that is both methodical and sensitive. The artist explores territories often left aside — industrial wastelands, precarious architectures, abandoned places of confinement — and enters into an almost archaeological dialogue with them. Before intervening, he observes at length, collects, documents, and questions past uses and existing forms.
On site, with a deliberately economical use of means and by drawing on the materials available, the artist adopts an approach somewhere between painting, sculpture, and light projections.
Over time, this patient work has given rise to a vast corpus of images that forms a genuine critical cartography of architectural margins. By turning away from emblematic monuments, Combarro seeks to reveal the ideologies at work in built landscapes, those that discreetly structure our everyday environments.
The architectures he explores, often in ruins or in transition, carry within them a strong temporal dimension. Once captured, they seem suspended between past and becoming, as if the image itself were becoming a space of transition.
Mirar a otro lado “Look Away” shows us an alternative geography, ordinary constructions that tell, in negative, the story of territories.
In Materia del silencio, the artist notably engages with a photograph by Agustí Centelles taken in 1939 in the internment camp of Bram. The image, showing a dormitory saturated with piled-up bodies, acts as a revelation of a memory largely obscured by various authoritarian regimes.
In Arquitectura y resistencia, the photographer turns his attention to self-built structures: makeshift shelters, improvised extensions, dwellings of necessity. These fragile forms, far from dominant urban planning logics, nonetheless assert a strong political dimension; they protect, occupy, resist.
Sotterranei explores the underground infrastructures of Rome and Naples. Aqueducts, cisterns, and quarries trace an invisible landscape, shaped by centuries of often-concealed labor, revealing the underside of monumental cities.
Serie Negra, devoted to Asturias, sees him intervene on former mining sites using materials found on site. Between abstraction and sculpture, his gestures reactivate the memory of a territory marked by extraction and its economic transformations.
Nicolás Combarro’s work thus acts as a displacement of the gaze. It invites us to consider what remains at the margins, to question those systems that organize our societies, and, above all, what they choose to leave in the shadows.
Jean-Jacques Ader
Curator: Marta Ramos-Izquierdo.
Nicolás Combarro : Mirar a otro lado
until August 9, 2026
University Museum of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) with Casa Velazquez
Campus Universitario, s/n,
31009 Pamplona, Navarre, Spain
https://museo.unav.edu/
