Words: Dina Jezdic / Photography: Aileen Chen / Published: Autumn 2026
There is a question Alberto García-Álvarez asks himself every morning. Not what to paint, not which canvas to return to, not which decade of accumulated work might surface today.
The question, he tells me with a quiet laugh, is simply: Should I get up?
He is 98 years old. He gets up.
He goes to the studio. This May, Tim Melville Gallery is presenting a new exhibition of work by García-Álvarez, the latest in a sustained and extraordinary sequence of annual shows that have made him, in his late 90s, one of the most vital presences in Aotearoa New Zealand abstract art. The works have not yet been selected. Tim Melville (Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atiawa) will come to the studio, move through the accumulated density of the space, and make choices. But to write a preview of this show is to confront the particularity of a practice that rejects the very idea of the preview. No new body of work finished in preparation for exhibition. No theme declared in advance. Only this: 50 years in the same studio—sunk into the slope of a garden, light flooding in from high windows—and the continuous act of making that happens inside it.
García-Álvarez has reflected on this process before, with characteristic clarity. “All my life is here,” he says, when I ask about the way a work from the 1970s might appear alongside something made last week. He means it structurally. The experience of a life does not divide itself into periods, does not respect the historian’s desire for chronology, the collector’s desire for series, the critic’s desire for development. I think of him standing close to a large canvas, poised before his next move, the entire history of the work alive in that stillness. A canvas begun in one decade may be taken up again in another because the thinking it holds has returned—changed, deepened, made strange by distance.
He wants to remain open, so the studio holds everything at once. Past and present are folded into the same continuing act, beyond archive and retrospective, a practice still very much alive. What strikes me, standing beside him in the studio on his birthday while he talks, is the feeling of freedom—and I say as much to him, cautiously, aware that labels are their own kind of trap. He doesn’t push back. His ideas are consistent with the word, even if he doesn’t reach for it himself. He does not believe in quality as a fixed measure, or in the categories of beautiful and ugly. “Everything is fantastic,” he says, “depending on how much you understand what you are looking at.” He offers an analogy: a person you initially find difficult, even unpleasant, who becomes through proximity, through attention, through time, your closest friend. The artwork, he suggests, operates the same way. Meaning is not given. It is arrived at.
The paintings and constructions are not solved problems, not objects to be judged against a standard of beauty or competence. They are, as he has written himself, moments of a life—“this moment or that moment years ago”—presented to a viewer who brings their own accumulated experience to meet them. The encounter is always a crossing: his interior life and yours, finding each other somewhere in the paint.
Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) comes to mind, that vast surface on which every figure carries the full weight of a human soul. García-Álvarez inhabits the same depth. In his painting, you always get more than you see. It is deeply personal, which is why it resists the binary of good and bad, turning instead toward something harder and more sustaining: the contemplation of life, of inner being, of contradiction as the very substance of beauty. By admitting the ugly, the difficult, the unresolved, he creates a complexity that makes the binary of quality feel beside the point.
It reminds me of Pablo Neruda’s ʻLa Muerta’, in which the poet speaks directly to his lost beloved, love persisting not despite loss but through it, the beloved carried forward in the body and breath of the living. García-Álvarez holds his entire life in the same way, in paint, in accumulated surface, in the act of returning. What matters is the internal condition. Endurance is his method.
He shows us what is possible when a practice refuses to justify itself against the demands of the current moment. I think of Collective Mind, his 1979 ceramic mural on the façade of the Science Building at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, a grid of 295 ceramic blocks advancing and receding into the brutalist concrete, some glazed white, some fired from clay excavated nearby, the whole surface alive with mathematical logic. That it lives on a science building feels entirely right. García-Álvarez has never recognised the boundary between art and science, between feeling and thinking, between the beautiful and the difficult. The mural has held its ground for decades, asking nothing of the passerby except attention.
García-Álvarez is the same. To spend an afternoon in his company is to understand what a rich life looks like. I came for a preview and left with something else entirely. Gratitude
I ask about one such slippage: the dark clot on the artist’s top lip in the self-portrait printed onto one of the chess squares in Civilisation (The Game). Or had he intentionally given himself this Saddam Hussein-esque facial hair? Hussein’s own portrait appears in Wall Games (2024), reproduced from an image of a street mural of the kind that is found all over the Middle East. He’s disappearing, face half rubbed away, floating in a field of desert-storm pink and poor and parasocial imagery—silhouetted camels, palm trees, fighter jets, Arabic script and more twining pythons. What’s left is Hussein’s iconography: aviators, beret, distinctive moustache. Yeldezian laughs at my question. The screen had collapsed as he pushed the pigments through its mesh, in just the right place so as to suggest this cartoonish family resemblance to the former Iraqi President— revolutionary hero or war criminal, depending on your point of view. “It was perfect,” Yeldezian says.
This solitary instance of self-portraiture mirrors that of Expat (2023), a small canvas replicating the ID page of the artist’s New Zealand passport, exhibited in Yeldezian’s last solo exhibition, Monument Valley. His biographical information is painted in uniform letters and his photograph manipulated, copied from a picture generated with a Snapchat filter so that his face has the smooth planes and simplified features of an animation. Yeldezian describes this work as his tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the situation he finds himself in as an artist of his complicated heritage in an Aotearoa already layered in identity politics. Most institutions prioritise practices in which the country’s bicultural history is legible, though tauiwi artists might gain access to this dyad through careful plays of a ‘third’ identity. If Expat is a nod to this dynamic, then the self-portrait (self-defacement) in Arena, styled as a Twitch streamer’s webcam thumbnail, feels like a dare from Yeldezian to his viewers to see him in the spectres of his origins, to identify him with the political subject whose image, to many, signifies the Islamist threat.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that Sabsabi also looked at, or was at least peripherally influenced by, the murals,” Yeldezian speculates, our conversation turning to Khaled Sabsabi, and the work cited by Creative Australia as their reason for cancelling the artist’s planned 2026 Venice Biennale project. You (2007) suggests a similar taboo identification to that of Yeldezian’s self-portrait. It’s a video installation in which footage of Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah until his assassination by the Israeli Defense Forces in September last year, is projected in a tile-like multi- channel formation, his features obliterated by a glaring white light that resembles the effects of deterioration on the murals. When Yeldezian speaks of these murals, it’s as images that wear the movement and fractures of their political hopes and horizons openly: “They’re everywhere in the Middle East and just so beautiful,” he says. “They’ve often been shot at or graffitied over, both by locals and invading forces. They fall apart as expressions of people’s favour. With the image of Saddam in particular, he’s worn away, so he vaguely looks like some Tom of Finland leather daddy. It’s another of these slips. I find it hilarious.”
Sabsabi’s critics interpreted the white light as holy: it’s the white light of the coming jihad, which is coming from outside of history. The artist’s treatment by Creative Australia, and, likewise, the censorship of many pro-Palestinian artists over the past sixteen months, has shown how readily the creative and political establishment will seize the phantasmal, timeless image of the infidel Middle East. It has also laid bare the rules of participation in contemporary art and the political limits of ‘origins’ in identity politics. It’s in this arena that Yeldezian makes his subtle plays, knowing full well it’s a trap. “The aim is to avoid crashing into your own tail,” he says, speaking about the trailing lines of pink pigment in Across Words, which he’d made by tilting the board while the paint was still wet, an action he based on the Snake game that came preinstalled on old Nokias. This can be quite difficult, as any foreign-policy expert will tell you.
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Part-way through the development of the exhibition, Yeldezian had to move studios. He vacated his small, shared space with the sink and moved into a large basement with no running water. You need running water to make silk-screens, so his experiments in printmaking were aborted with half of the works still to be made. “The three small collage works and the big drop-cloth piece arose out of being surrounded by all the detritus and ephemera, leftovers from the show’s production,” he said. “Partly out of frustration, I guess, I became interested in the things that happen on the floor of the studio, these incidental forms of printing.”
This shift can be felt in the show. The more time I spent looking at the paintings, the more fixated I became on a thump I recognised within them: a persistent arrhythmia of falling Lockheed Martin logos and relief packages, the bloodied boot-prints and the edict/siren-cry of Raid Raid Raid Raid stamped over and again, all seeming to assert this act of painting as a downward force. Then there are the two emphatic drops of waxy scarlet paint in Across Words, like the red defilement of the newspaper’s masthead as The New York War TCrimes by pro-Palestine activists protesting its portrayal of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The painting, too, subjects the rag to its fate: the legacy publication with its passive voice and yesterday’s news enters a lower class of circulation among the studio refuse, useful perhaps for cleaning the window glass or covering the floor.
“Burial is important,” Yeldezian says when I share this with him. “I’m interested in what images get buried in others. One of the images that the whole show hinges around comes from what was called the ‘flour massacre’ in the news. The only footage as far as the Western media was concerned was coming from the IDF—aerial drone footage of Gazans rushing all at once to reach the aid, but also running away because they’re getting shot at. Those images made people look like an insect infestation. It was in trying not to reproduce this image directly that I ended up with so much of what’s in the show … Make of that what you will.”
What can you make of such gruesome distortions, now ‘boring scarecrows’ staked in the collective visual field?[02] An ad for a Disney cruise follows news of the latest war crime. Politicians show off plans for holiday resorts to be built on felled cities and the bones of the Palestinian dead. You play the daily Wordle while the columnists manufacture consent. Stray bullets find their way into the bodies of three-year-old young ladies.[03] Of the many conflict images Yeldezian does reproduce, most come from drone interfaces, or, in the case of No Players Online (2024), from the popular video game Full Spectrum Warrior, and Virtual Iraq, a war simulation therapy programme used by the U.S. military to treat symptoms of PTSD in returned soldiers. Real or virtual—you never really know which. They topple into one another. Virtual Iraq is modelled on Full Spectrum Warrior, and Full Spectrum Warrior was developed with support from the US Army’s Science and Technology division, looking to see if gaming technology was a viable complement to traditional training procedures; players of the game are equipped with weaponry modelled on the arsenal recruits could expect to use in real combat. Terrible chickens and terrible eggs. Here’s more: the Israeli Defense Forces’ Urban Warfare Training Center known colloquially to the soldiers who drill there as ‘Mini Gaza’, which was built to emulate the narrow, logicless alleyways of Gaza’s cities and refugee camps; a call to prayer plays five times a day over speakers, and murals to the martyred decorate its walls.
I want to write that Yeldezian ‘intervenes in’ or ‘disrupts’ this frictionless churn of junk and violence that he paints within and about, but only because that’s the language that comes easily to describe the work of the artist. Truthfully, I don’t wholly believe that’s what his paintings are doing, nor do I think he believes that’s what he’s doing. Look more closely at Across Words and you notice the browser tab reads ‘Manage Your Subscription’. The artist also wonders if boycotting is enough.
Maybe it’s something, if never enough, that these paintings “feel the catastrophe,” to borrow Nan Goldin’s phrase.[04] Dehumanisation is a way of seeing. It turns people into ants and warfare into games. And Arena doesn’t let us out of it. We might think, “I feel bombarded by these images”—and then we might hear ourselves.
