How many times, especially in periods like this one, when heat becomes a constant and often debilitating presence, have we dreamed of the sea. Dipping our feet in and letting the water bring our body temperature down, submerging ourselves to feel nothing at all, surrounded by blue, carried along by the currents. Perhaps Pablo Zabala knows this feeling well — the absence of the sea turning into sadness and longing — so much so that he has made it his mission to bring the ocean to places where it doesn’t exist.

Born in 1994, Pablo Zabala grew up in Getxo, a small town within the greater Bilbao area, crossed by the Nervión river, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean right there. He grew up with the daily presence of the sea, its colours and its constant changes, and carries all of it with him wherever he goes to paint.

He is self-taught, drawn to muralism from the very beginning, and later graduated in painting from the University of the Basque Country. The thread running through all his work is the realism of line and colour, from which he builds a singular chromatic topography centred on the representation of nature — above all, the sea and its movement.

The blues and greens he uses never settle. They contradict each other, push against one another, giving back that physical sensation of something shifting before your eyes — a wave that hasn’t yet decided where to break. On the building facades he paints, this effect is at once disorienting and necessary: a wall is the most immobile surface there is, and yet it seems to move.

At a time when climate change is rewriting needs and geographies alike, painting the sea onto the walls of cities is a form of quiet resistance — a reminder, to anyone passing by, of what we risk losing.