Very nearly the same but different (1992) is an oil painting first shown in the second solo exhibition of works by Jesús María (Kutxu) Otamendi at the Emilio Navarro Gallery in 1992. The first was in 1990. This second exhibition consolidated his position as one of the most promising young artists in Spain at the time. That promise was cut short by his untimely death just a year later.

In an exhibition commemorating his work in 2012 (the year when he would have been 50) at the Sanz-Enea Kultur Etxea venue in his home town of Zarautz, his friend the painter Iñaki Imaz described his approach to painting in a piece called Hasta la vista ['Until we meet again']: '[...] once a painting affects you, it does so forever. It may sound like an exaggeration, but I believe that life changes from that moment on. More or less, but something changes inside us and there's no going back. You might think this happens all the time, but it doesn't [...] Anyone who paints wants people to see what they've painted, and they themselves want to see it too, not in just any old way but as it becomes visible'.

Otamendi's form of visual expression involved a journey through the history of painting, and also through the 'emergencies and affections' hinted at in the words of Iñaki Imaz. As in Very nearly the same but different, his paintings are characterised by dull grey, white and earthy monochrome backgrounds. On these surfaces he sets out a whole alphabet of forms, a grammar that evokes a territory where, to paraphrase Imaz again, he organises waste into misty, dreamlike images with signs and cellular systems almost without hierarchy, like possible, pre-linguistic worlds'. Viewers immediately recognise the collection of images on show, because they refer to the most basic of objects: stars, hand-prints, boats, flags, rudders and planes; objects that coexist with signs, letters and words that act as clues and tracks in the dream-world called into being by the artist and his paintings produced from necessity.

Beatriz Herráez