Casa MB is pleased to present Tierras altas, an exhibition of works by Emilio González Sainz. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens on June 12 at Casa MB in Milan, with an opening reception from 7 to 9 pm.
In the dreamlike tableaux of Emilio González Sainz, painting becomes not just a form of seeing but a modality of wandering—both physical and metaphysical. Tierras altas, his latest suite of paintings at M+B invoke a kind of mythopoeic topography, where lovers dissolve into mist, birds drift through painterly ether, and cliffs lean inward like listening gods. “Painting a landscape is like strolling through it and entering it while inventing it as you go,” Sainz writes, framing his practice not as a conquest of vision, but as a lyrical collaboration between memory, mastery, and mystery.
Working almost exclusively in oil on linen or canvas, Sainz conjures an elusive, elegiac romanticism—an interior Arcadia refracted through the sensibility of a late Goya or the haunted clarity of Caspar David Friedrich. But here, melancholy is not theatrical. It hovers in works like Los amantes imposibles and La isla de las vírgenes, where amorphous figures and spectral architectures shimmer within soft-edged geographies. There is a deliberate quietude to his brushwork, a kind of whispering precision that feels more akin to remembering than observing.
Throughout the exhibition, the motifs repeat like fragments of a half-recalled dream—mirrors, horses, trees, clouds, thresholds. In El jinete discreto, a lone rider emerges from a muted horizon, not heroic but meditative, as if summoned from a line of poetry rather than a battlefield. Elsewhere, in El espejo, reflection becomes a metaphor not just for self-regard, but for painting itself: a suspended state of doubled seeing, where the real and the imagined blur.
Sainz aligns himself with a lineage of painters who walk to see and paint to remember. “There are two schools for the landscape painter,” he muses, “walks in the countryside and the old masters.” His works unfold as visual palimpsests, where the footprints of Patinir, Dürer, and Poussin overlap with those of wandering poets and solitary dreamers. And yet, there is nothing archaic in his vision. These are not historical pastiches but landscapes of interiority, charting the liminal terrain between reverie and recollection.
The exhibition culminates in pieces like La carne y el verbo and Días de marzo, where the corporeal and the celestial meet in delicate equilibrium. It is here that Sainz’s paintings achieve their quiet transcendence—not through monumentality, but through the intimate drama of detail, gesture, and tone.
Painting is not a fixed destination but a continual pilgrimage. Emilio González Sainz does not offer us maps; he offers paths, traces, whispers. And like Goya’s bearded wanderer, he reminds us that art is not about arriving, but about the radical act of continuing—of still learning.
Emilio González Sainz received his education at the University of the Basque Country and has exhibited extensively throughout Spain for over four decades. Recent solo exhibitions include Uccelliana (2025) and La luna del cazador (2023) at Galería Siboney in Santander; Lo nuevo at Galería Trinta in Santiago de Compostela (2022); El paseante at Fundación Cajacírculo in Burgos (2022); and Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet at Galería Utopia Parkway in Madrid (2021). Internationally, his work was included in Korrespondenz at Galerie Alte Apotheke in Walldorf, Germany (2024).
He has received numerous awards, including the Gold Medal at the International Exhibition of Visual Arts in Valdepeñas (2015), the Focus-Abengoa International Painting Prize (2009), and top honors from the Government of Cantabria. His work is held in the collections of the Museo de B.B.A.A. de Santander, La Caixa, Fundación Focus-Abengoa, and others. Sainz lives and works in northern Spain.