Simon Zabell has mainly used painting, sculpture and installation to work on projects with a markedly scenographic content, often based on the works of other creators such as the French radical author Alain Robbe-Grillet, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and even masters from the distant past such as El Greco. His work is thus frequently touted as a type of hypertext – rather than a mere illustration or version – where literature, history and the artistic media are intertwined.

In 2014, Zabell embarked on an ambitious project lasting over a year, generically entitled Our Men in Tahiti, to which the Banco de España canvas, a large painting that was unveiled at Arco 2016, belongs. This work is based on extensive research around Robert Louis Stevenson’s last finished novel The Ebb-Tide. By drawing on Stevenson, Zabell continued with the literary roots that inspired part of his earlier work, introducing aspects such as colonialism, criticism of the western view that exoticises other latitudes and the legendary, unreal glaze that literature spreads over biographical and historical facts. Zabell’s extensive field work maintained a constant search that took him from Stevenson’s pages to different parts of the world, including Scotland, the United States and Tahiti, following the track of any aspect related to the book, from its settings to meetings with world experts in the field.  The results of that search began to take shape in paintings such as this, in sculptures and in a short documentary film that was screened for the first time in 2016.

Entering into that play between the narrative and the immediacy of the painting, Zabell adds a quote from Stevenson’s novel on the back of the canvases in colours that seem to capture a post-nuclear, dystopian world: ‘White birds whisked in the air above, a shoal of parti-coloured fishes in the scarce denser medium below; between, like Mahomet’s coffin, the boat drew away briskly on the surface, and its shadow followed it over the glittering floor of the lagoon’.

Carlos Martín