Gabriel Zea Art

Gabriel Zea is an artist who recently relocated to Seattle from NYC. As an artist at Base Camp Studios 2, he is here to create and share his oil paintings, drawings, and prints in Studio #8!

For the past few years, he’s been creating oil paintings with chaotic compositions of figures embroiled in some kind of conflict, physical or internal, rendered in a monochrome or close to monochrome color theme. The imagery has largely come from a desire to visualize, in as visceral a metaphor as he can, the conflicting experience of navigating the incredible visual chaos of the modern digital world – a world full of a dizzying range of styles that can encompass eye-catching advertisements, seamless and seductive graphic design or UI, purposefully haphazard imagery cleverly put together in memes, and even AI created amalgamations that can capably mimic reality.

The whirlwind of commentary and contradicting opinions cast by the internet onto this circus of visual media and propaganda creates in his view a kind of schizophrenic headspace consisting of ceaseless friction. Visualizing this headspace in a grounded style, fused with the historicity of figurative realism and physicality of oil painting in particular, provides catharsis and invites philosophical questions about the constant tumult, physical and emotional, throughout human history and existence. His work aims to reach those who also feel inundated in the modern discourse of social media, politics, and pop culture, and want to step back to try to frame and digest the discourse in a more stable form.