Gregory de la Haba

Every painting is a search for equilibrium.

Painting has always been, for me, an act of searching for equilibrium. Whether working from the human figure, the architecture of the city, or the accumulated surfaces of printed imagery, I begin each painting without certainty. The work evolves through acts of placement, adjustment, removal, and return until disparate elements begin to speak to one another. There comes a moment—rare, unpredictable, and impossible to force—when tension gives way to harmony and the painting assumes a life independent of its maker. That is the moment I pursue.

My recent body of work, Il Capochiave, represents the clearest expression of that search. Named

after the architectural anchor plates found throughout Venice, the capochiave are structural devices that stabilize buildings by holding opposing forces in balance. In my paintings they become compositional instruments and symbolic forms, establishing rhythm, order, and contemplation.

Working over large-scale printed images of New York doors and urban façades, I transform familiar fragments of the city into spaces of reflection. Layers of oil paint obscure, reveal, and reimagine the photographic surface until architecture becomes psychological, where memory, history, and imagination converge.

Although my work has evolved through many visual languages, its concerns have remained constant: light, order, beauty, contemplation, and transcendence. I seek paintings that reward sustained looking and continue to unfold over time.

Nothing is arbitrary. Every gesture, interval, color, and form must justify its presence. Ultimately, my paintings seek to reconcile structure and intuition, permanence and change, the urban and the timeless, the visible and the mythic.

—Gregory de la Haba