Gregorio Sabillón - Perfection and Cruelty

Loquats and walnuts

Echoing the profound and human realism of Cervantes or Velázquez, Sabillón's style is characterized by its meticulous technique, blending formal beauty and ugliness with hyperrealism and surrealism. This allows him to depict, for example, simple open walnuts whose interiors resemble entrails. He also juxtaposes landscapes and interiors of striking beauty with deformed, aged, or grotesquely vulgar human figures, to which he adds bird heads or fish bones, as well as other half-decomposed or dead animal components.

Gregorio Sabillón - Narcisa

This dualism is the source of the viewer's unease as they attempt to find explanations for seemingly futile ones. With his unique world of phantasmagoria, mysteries, and unsettling beings reminiscent of Bosch or Bruegel, Sabillón highlights the fleeting nature of life, or the "memento moris"—remember that everything is transient and changeable—a phrase coined during the plagues of the Middle Ages or by the great writers of the Golden Age. Masterfully narrated, the transformations of Sabillón's creatures reflect taboos such as illness, aging, deformity, and death, reminding us of our vulnerability and thus achieving, through fear or rejection, the artist's ultimate goal: to provoke.