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LAREDO. Vicente Jáuregui is a Laredo resident from Bilbao who has been captivated by art since childhood. The Sala Rúas Creative Space hosts, until November 13, a small exhibit of his sculptures and pictorial creations in which he expresses his particular way of conceiving the world.

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His vocation as a sculptor is self-taught and reflected in his sculptural work. Here it was his father who played a decisive role in giving him a sculptor's easel at the young age of 13. From that gift, he began to model an artistic career that has led him to explore many themes and styles. His brother Gonzalo jabbed him with the poison of painting when he was still in the realist stage, which he later abandoned to embrace abstraction. Vicente's paintings dive obsessively into the Cantabria coast, which he uses as an escape route to be able to digest the beauty of the place he now calls home. "It's a beautiful place, and I love to reflect it in my work," he says.

 

His relationship with the Enrique Alonso Llamas Gallery in Bilbao gave rise to pieces around folkloric costumbrista characters: sardine seller girls, trawlers, and other motifs from the Basque landscape and peasantry. Vicente Jáuregui manages to portray these pieces in all their expressive splendor. His clay creations ended in bronze at that stage through a Gipuzkoan foundry, Piriz. That period required mastering new skills, such as skating in jobs that gave him some of his most rewarding feeling of satisfaction. As an anecdote, he refers to the situation he experienced in a French antique market, where he located one of his works and was surprised by the high price at which it was for sale. When he questioned the piece's value,  his interlocutor snapped at him. "Because it is a Jáuregui." The response filled the receiver with pride and gratitude, leaving the seller unaware that he was before the work's author.

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A bust of his first friend in Laredo, Jesús Mari Castillo, illustrates the exhibition's poster. And it opens the way to the enjoyment of the compositions as striking as that of a trawler in full action, a bust of Tolstoy, or the iconic Romanov family of Tsar Nicholas II. Works in which an attachment to Russian aesthetics and culture is perceived, although, in his inspiration, he drinks from great national masters such as Mariano Benlliure himself.

 

Now, integrated as a student in the Ceramics Workshop of the Casa de Cultura de Laredo directed by Jesús González, he thanks Luis Sanchéz for the opportunity to exhibit in his adopted home a way of understanding life and art. characterized by its unconditionality. Surrounded by family and friends, he felt comforted.