ABOUT ME

Hello, I’m Damián Basante Arbues, an Argentine visual artist living in the Spain of my paternal grandmother and based on the Andalusian Costa del Sol.
Surprised by how I could draw, from the age of three my parents always encouraged and supported me to express myself however I wished. Eternal gratitude to them!

In my teenage years I started taking it more seriously, and from the age of fifteen I studied drawing with Horacio Lalia for three years. After finishing high school, I entered the University of Arts and in 2009 graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts, specializing in Drawing and Sculpture. In 2010, I began working as an art teacher.

During my university years I had already started developing a stronger interest in painting and photography. I shifted from sculpture to oil painting and began documenting my backpacking journeys with a camera in hand.

Over the years, I sold some of my works and received more and more oil painting commissions. At the same time, as I worked photographing theater productions and music bands, travel photography began to set the rhythm of my creative pulse.

The pandemic, along with my plans to migrate to Spain in 2021, pushed me into the digital world. I started working as a stock photographer and launched a YouTube channel focused on travel and cultural tourism.

Now, living in Andalusia, I’ve set up my new studio and officially brought painting and photography together under mutual influence.
After years of searching for my own visual identity, both practices reached a point of maturity, becoming an alternating dialogue between the dynamic yet contemplative experiences of my travels, and the calm, introspective work inside my studio.

In the history of art, painting and photography have often crossed paths, but usually with the intention of differentiating themselves rather than overlapping. What captured my attention was the indistinct crossing—not in the image itself, but in the process and the approach. The distinction of the final result lies in the medium and in how the work connects with the audience.

At the end of the day, both painting and photography aim to convey the same thing, but through different tools. The very same image, presented in a different format, can strike completely different chords in someone.

This dialogue is possible because everything I’ve learned about color theory in painting I apply to photographic editing, and everything I’ve learned about photographic composition I apply to creating paintings.

As a photographer and oil painter, I capture—and reinterpret—urban, natural, and rural scenes with an intimate, symbolic, and deeply human gaze, often tied to identity, memory, and territory.

While traveling, everything is new: my senses expand and, with camera in hand, I freeze moments, places, situations, and people. Later, in the studio, I go through a more analytical creative process, where those fragments of the journey—those frames that bore witness to my experiences—transmute into oil reinterpretations infused with a more personal worldview, now intervened by subjective experience.

My creative process flows between these two streams that separate and cyclically converge. Through each of them, I perceive the passage of time and connect with reality around me in different ways.

Both disciplines also find their space in videographic production through their respective YouTube channels, where I share the behind-the-scenes of my travels and the making of my artworks.