Tomás Ibarra

Load-Bearing

2025 · Graphite and gesso on panel · 140 × 100 cm

Tomás Ibarra (Bilbao, 1990) builds his graphite blocks the way a bricklayer builds a wall — pass after pass, burnishing each layer before starting the next, until the surface stops reflecting light like paper and starts reflecting it like stone. Load-Bearing is the largest and darkest work he has shown: four blocks stacked with no visible support, a quiet joke about the columns he used to draw for other people's buildings before he left architecture school. He keeps the plaster ground bare at the edges on purpose, so a wall this heavy still looks like it is resting on something soft.