Ruben
Saavedra
Artist
About Ruben
Rubén Saavedra Cobeñas paints interiors: rooms full of things worth looking at slowly, like photographs, other works of art, sculptures, movie posters, or some image of what is happening in the world right now. He is a Peruvian painter based in Lima, and before he gave himself to painting he was an architect. Some of that stayed with him: a love of spaces, of how a place gets lived in, and of everything a room can say about the history and the taste of whoever lives there.
Painting came long before architecture, though. As a kid, playing and painting turned into almost the same thing, and he did it pretty much every day. He says he still holds on to the most important part of that time, the simplicity of a child who always wants to discover something new, and you can see it in the curiosity he packs into every canvas.
The thing about his work is that each painting is an image made of other images. References that have no business meeting end up sharing the same canvas, and the fun is in figuring out how they connect. Rubén describes it as a lot of visual pleasure that comes with a lot of questions, and that is exactly it: you walk up for the beauty and stay to connect the dots, spotting a piece here and a poster there, trying to work out what they are doing together in the same room. His world is eclectic because his taste is, and every painting ends up feeling a bit like a personal collection.
He works straight onto the canvas, no sketches. He often has several paintings going at once, because oil takes its time to dry and while one waits he can move on to the next. To paint, he needs to feel at peace, with good music on. He is very particular about his materials, with an eye to the work holding up over time, and there is one detail that defines what he does and that barely comes through in a photo: the impasto. The surface has real relief, a texture you can actually touch, and it completely changes the way you see the painting.
That is why people who see his work in person are often more moved than they expected. The photo gives you a first impression, but standing in front of the canvas, with light catching the texture, it is a different experience. These are paintings to sit down with and take in, and to live with. From the people who own his work, Rubén has learned that a painting is not just a collector’s object: over time it becomes part of the day, one of those places your eyes keep going back to after everything daily life asks of you.
There is one story he has never forgotten. A woman who had come to know his work and his studio wanted to give one of his paintings to her mother. She asked for something special: that it include a photo of her mother’s father, who had passed away. It was a black-and-white shot of a man walking out of the sea with two little girls, and Rubén found it beautiful, so he painted it. On the day of the delivery she came with her mother and her sister, and the moment they saw the painting all three of them broke into tears. He remembers it as a lovely moment between the artist and them.
Rubén does not have a favorite piece; whatever he is painting at the moment is the most important one. What he does care about is that, whenever people talk about his work, they do not lose sight of what is inside each piece, beyond the way it looks. For him, every painting is a door into a lot of questions, and the fun is in sitting with it for a while and looking for the answers.