By Yoab Vera
January 2026
On the occasion of his exhibition Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos, the artist Yoab Vera writes about the concepts he explores in his new body of work.
Yoab Vera
Sensing Horizons: ser libre como el mar; libre para amar, libre para soñar, 2025
oil, oil-stick, and concrete on canvas, framed
61 x 78 3/4 in. (155 x 200 cm.)
These notes bring together my current thinking around Spirit of Hope – Sueños Diurnos as an exhibition and as an ongoing studio inquiry. The first section, Exhibition Notes, reflects how the works operate together in time, space, and experience, including how I was already thinking about the exhibition layout and the relationship between the two rooms while painting the works for the show. The second section, Studio Notes, gathers a more condensed set of studio notes that outline some of the underlying concerns la pausa, horizon, affect, and hope that guide my practice.
Installation view of Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos (January 21-February 25, 2026) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Spirit of Hope – Sueños Diurnos takes shape through painting as a temporal choreography of contemplation. The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of pauses, returns, and shifts of attention that are first registered in the body before becoming thought. For me, hope happens inside experience through duration, repetition, and the slow persistence of looking. It takes form through gestures repeated with awareness, through colors that reappear in altered relationships, and through the steady presence of the horizon as a point of orientation. These are seascape paintings, but they begin as geometric abstractions. Their subject is not the view alone, but the act of remaining with the present as it unfolds.
The exhibition takes its title from The Spirit of Hope, an essay by Byung Chul Han, where hope is understood as an active force that opens meaning rather than as a condition of waiting. Sueños Diurnos appears as its Spanish companion, naming the same idea of active inner movement. I title my works in both Spanish and English because that is how I think, speak, and live. The dialogue between languages is not ornamental. It is a daily condition of translation, of small shifts in meaning, and of reframing experience. Long before reading Han, I had already been painting with hope, contemplation, and deceleration as lived concerns. His language did not give me a theme so much as a vocabulary that resonated with what I was already sensing in the studio. Hope as something practiced, embodied, and directional, always in conversation with uncertainty and acceptance.
Each painting begins as an act of orientation. Intention comes before image. Before touching the canvas, there is a desire for a work that can hold a contemplative state and invite a pause rather than demand attention. I draw to explore compositional and chromatic possibilities, but they never prescribe what will happen. The translation from drawing to painting is not one to one. Uncertainty enters the process early, and I accept that the painting will reveal itself in its own way. The first decisive gesture on the canvas is the height of the horizon. Once that line is drawn, the surface opens. From that moment on, painting becomes a matter of responding to color, to light, to resistance, and to the slow accumulation of time in the work. Hope enters here not as optimism, but as trust in direction, sentido, before outcome.
Yoab Vera
Sensing Horizons: contemplar el diario, umbral de vida, 2025
oil, oil-stick, and concrete on canvas, framed
61 x 78 3/4 in. (155 x 200 cm.)
The series Sensing Horizons grows from an earlier body of work, Horizontes de Sentido, developed around the idea of the horizon as a carrier of meaning. In Sensing Horizons, each painting gathers a different state of presence around that line. In Sensing Horizons: contemplar el diario, umbral de vida, attention to the everyday becomes a threshold. The ordinary is not treated as background, but as a point of entry into another way of being present.
Sensing Horizons: respirar, simplemente respirar centers on breath as the simplest and most constant form of return. The sea becomes a field where inhaling and exhaling are felt through the rhythm of the painting itself, through the slow accumulation of horizontal strokes. Breath here is not metaphor alone. It is a bodily measure that structures time and attention.
Sensing Horizons ser libre, libre como el mar; libre para amar, libre para soñar approaches freedom not as escape, but as an inner permission to move, to feel, and to imagine. The horizon holds that permission without forcing it into narrative. These works do not illustrate stories. They cultivate conditions in which contemplation and agency can coexist.
Yoab Vera
Temporal Horizons: gracias a la vida, 2025
oil, oil-stick, and concrete on canvas, framed
51 1/8 x 70 7/8 in. (130 x 180 cm.)
The series Temporal Horizons extends this attention into time. In Temporal Horizons: gracias a la vida, gratitude appears as a position that does not simplify experience. The layered bands of color across sea and sky carry different densities of light, as if several seasons of feeling were held at once. Each horizon within the painting carries a slightly different temperature.
Temporal Horizons: abrazar la vida y su latido secreto listens for a shared pulse beneath surfaces. The painting is built through attunement to that subtle rhythm, where empathy becomes a way of sensing continuity between bodies, spaces, and moments. In both works, time is not treated as a line of progress or decline, but as a lived thickness where past, present, and possible futures overlap.
The group of four vertical works titled Spirit of Hope: sintiendo el latir del momento (Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice) registers the cycle of the seasons as recurring states of light and attention. Each painting shares the same format and the same horizon height, while the interaction of sky, sun, and sea shifts. Spring holds a tender brightness. Summer expands saturation and warmth. Autumn condenses that warmth into a deeper glow. Winter introduces a quieter and cooler sky that still carries resonance rather than emptiness. These paintings do not stage the seasons as productivity, fullness, decline, and absence, but attend instead to how light and color modulate perception and mood.
Yoab Vera
Spirit of Hope: pausa – promesas del instante (New Year), 2025
oil, oil-stick, and concrete on canvas, framed
70 7/8 x 51 1/8 in. (180 x 130 cm.)
Spirit of Hope: pausa promesas del instante (New Year) inserts the event of the New Year into this sequence as a held pause. The sun rests near the line where sky and sea meet. The painting keeps that instant open as a moment where promise is felt as direction rather than as achievement.
In most of the seascapes, the sun remains close to the horizon, near the moment when light leans toward rising or setting. This is an interval when color becomes most charged and brief. One work shifts this pattern deliberately. In Sensing Horizons: ser libre, libre como el mar; libre para amar, libre para soñar, the sun moves toward the zenith. The change is not about exposure but about temporality. Light is no longer suspended between arrival and departure. It occupies the present more fully.
In Daydreams: luna del alba, florece la esperanza, the formation changes again. A moon appears in early morning light above a horizon made of flowers rather than water. The surface is built from small pointillist marks that gather at the line where sea and sky would normally meet. Below that line, vertical stems rise through a green field. Time feels layered here, neither fully night nor fully day. This deviation from the seascape motif opens another tonal register in the exhibition, shaped by blooming, tenderness, and the quiet persistence of hope.
The two Daydreams paintings work as interior compasses. Daydreams: a mar íntimo, brújula interna gathers the intimacy of the sea as a guiding space. This is the only work in which the horizon rises higher, allowing most of the surface to become water. The painting brings together colors that echo across the exhibition, including bright pink and turquoise. Daydreams: luna del alba, florece la esperanza brings the moon into daylight and aligns it with a field of flowers. Daydreams here are not escapes. They are rehearsals of inner movement, subtle shifts of direction that take place before external action.
Yoab Vera
Semana Serenata: Sueños Diurnos, 2025
oil, oil-stick, and concrete on canvas, framed
overall: 9 7/8 x 69 1/8 (25 x 140 cm.)
each: 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in. (25 x 20 cm.)
Semana Serenata Sueños Diurnos stretches this inner rhythm into a horizon built from seven vertical elements. Each segment carries a different sky or sea, some recalling the palette of the seasonal Spirit of Hope paintings, others opening small variations. Installed together, the seven units form a continuous passage of time where repetition gives rise to change.
Recuerditos Cotidianos: superbloom – scent of hope gathers the entire exhibition into a concentrated scale. The idea of a superbloom here is understood as a brief and dense emergence of color and life after a long period of restraint. The painting compresses that intensity into a small surface that can be approached at close range. Hope appears here not as expansion, but as concentration. It is held, revisited, and remembered through closeness.
Color moves through the exhibition as memory, relation, and emotional calibration. It is not one color that anchors the work, but the meeting of several. Rosa mexicano, pale yellow, turquoise, light blue, and deeper blues that lean toward violet return across different paintings, never in the same way twice. My early education in color came from walking the streets of Coyoacán, where façades, plants, shadows, and sky form daily chromatic encounters. Long before the studio, those walks trained my eye to notice how color shifts through light, through weather, and through time.
Nearly half of my life has also been spent outside of Mexico. Distance altered my relationship to these colors. What once felt given became something I had to return to slowly, with attention. Returning every year to Mexico has made me aware of how repetition sharpens perception. What is seen again is not the same as what was seen before. Return opens perspective rather than closing it.
Yoab Vera at Yoab Vera: Scent of Time: Horizontes Temporales (February 5–February 24, 2024), Casa Gilardi, Mexico City, MX presented by Saenger Galería.
Concrete enters the paintings as structure, memory, and touch. Mixed with oil and oilstick, it thickens the surface and gives the painting resistance. I am interested in how this material can exist in painting without being depicted as architecture. It appears instead as weight, duration, and trace. Over time, the concrete tends to disappear beneath layers of color while continuing to shape the relief.
Spirit of Hope Sueños Diurnos was conceived with the gallery’s two rooms in mind, imagined as a connected field and as a spatial rhythm. In the larger room, the four vertical seasonal works titled Spirit of Hope establish a steady axis of presence. Across from them, the two works from Sensing Horizons offer a counterpoint, inviting the gaze to move back and forth between shared horizons. Within this dialogue, Temporal Horizons gracias a la vida holds the space in balance, while Daydreams a mar íntimo, brújula interna appears between the windows as a quieter inward turn. Seen from across the smaller room, Daydreams a mar íntimo, brújula interna is the first work to come into view, carrying chromatic echoes that recall Sensing Horizons gracias a la vida. This shared palette is meant to activate a sensorial memory that subtly shifts as the viewer moves between rooms and becomes aware of the change in scale between the works. In the smaller room, the paintings continue to resonate chromatically and rhythmically with what has already been encountered, extending memory across spaces and allowing echoes to return. The viewer’s movement through the rooms becomes part of the work itself, a slow choreography of attention, recognition, and subtle reorientation.
Across the exhibition, hope stays in motion. It passes from color to color, from one horizon to the next, from one temporal register to another. These paintings propose contemplation not as retreat, but as a form of active staying. A pause that is also a beginning.
Installation view of Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos (January 21-February 25, 2026) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
I paint because I need to. Painting is a way of staying with the world without being overtaken by its speed. It offers a pause that is not passive, but intentional. A slowing in which perception can settle, attention can deepen, and the body can remain present long enough to register what is usually passed over or ignored.
In the studio, painting becomes a temporal practice rather than a means toward an image. Repetition, horizontal movement, and the tactile resistance of oil and concrete slow time down. The hand moves steadily from right to left, again and again, allowing rhythm to replace urgency. The body listens before the mind intervenes. Time thickens. What matters is not progress, but staying with the surface long enough for something to reveal itself. A horizon begins to appear, not as an image or destination, but as an orientation. It quietly organizes the surface and the act of looking. Once the horizon is placed, the painting opens as a field of relation rather than a composition to be resolved. Color, pressure, and material resistance begin to speak back. Decisions are made slowly, through attunement rather than control. Painting becomes less about expression and more about remaining present with what is unfolding, trusting that a sense of direction can emerge without being forced.
Many of the works share a single horizon line across different panels and formats. This repetition creates a shared threshold that allows the paintings to interconnect without merging into one another. Each work remains autonomous, yet the repeated horizon invites correspondence, recognition, and return. The viewer senses continuity without encountering sameness. Color migrates across works over time. A turquoise reappears later in a different register. A soft pink resurfaces under altered light. These recurrences form a constellation rather than a sequence. Repetition functions here as a memory device. It ties what has just been seen to what will appear again, activating a subtle sense of anticipation and recall. Through this process, repetition generates affect. It prepares the ground for recognition without announcing it. In this way, repetition becomes part of hope’s structure, not as reassurance or repetition of meaning, but as the possibility of continuity held open across time and experience.
Installation view of Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos (January 21-February 25, 2026) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Drawing from Byung Chul Han’s understanding of hope as orientation rather than optimism, I experience painting as a practice of trust in direction, sentido, before outcome. Sentido in Spanish carries several meanings at once. It refers to orientation, direction, sense, and something that is felt. This multiplicity matters to me. It allows hope to exist not as a fixed goal or promise, but as a lived alignment between body, perception, and meaning. In this sense, hope is not projected forward but practiced in the present. It becomes bodily and tactile. It is felt through breath, through the steady act of looking, through the patience required to let a surface accumulate time. These paintings do not ask to be consumed quickly. They ask for presence. They invite the viewer to stay long enough for perception to slow and subtly shift.
Sueños diurnos (daydreams) are central to this body of work. Daydreaming, for me, is not an escape from reality but a forward movement within it. It is a space where something not yet fully conscious begins to take form quietly, without insistence or narrative. In these paintings, the horizon becomes a hinge between memory and future. Between what has been lived and what has not yet been articulated. Subtle changes of color, light, and rhythm suggest an unfolding rather than a conclusion. The works hold open a space where imagination and perception overlap, allowing the viewer to sense possibility without needing to name it or resolve it.
A horizon is a device for pausing.
A field of color is a resting place for the gaze.
A repeated palette is a soft hand on the shoulder of memory.
In a world shaped by acceleration and constant reaction, la pausa becomes a form of agency. It is a way of recognizing oneself within the present rather than being carried past it. My hope is that these paintings offer that experience. A moment of slowing where attention can recalibrate, where breath can return, and where presence can quietly take hold again.
Yoab Vera in the studio, Mexico City, MX, 2025.
Yoab Vera (b. Mexico City, 1985) received an MFA from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also studied meditation practices at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He graduated with a BA in Studio Art and Art History with a concentration in Latin American Art from Hunter College, New York, NY, and studied Architecture in Mexico City at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His work has been exhibited at Casa Gilardi, Mexico City, MX; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Casa MB, Milan, IT; El Castillete, Madrid, ES; Andrea Festa, Rome, IT; Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; Saenger Galería, Mexico City, MX; CFHILL, Stockholm; and GAVLAK Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Vera has held residencies at Duplex AIR, Lisbon, PT; El Castillete, Madrid, ES; Roman Road, Berlin, DE; and Fresco and Vernacular Architecture Painting School, Oaxaca City, MX. He was awarded the New York Community Trust Award in Painting and Poetry and has also received awards from the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The artist lives and works between Mexico City and Istanbul.
The exhibition follows the artist’s first solo show at the gallery Yoab Vera: Reminiscence — Contigo Aprendí (July 10-August 22, 2024). Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.
Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from January 21-February 25, 2026.
Installation view of Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos (January 21-February 25, 2026) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
