Dr Amaia Salazar
Visual artist | Art Researcher | Creative Coach | Associate Professor
Paint in the imagination with words, 2024
This work emerges from the encounter between word and image, from the luminous friction that arises when two practices (poetry and visual creation) touch until they become a single breath. Paints in the Imagination with Words is presented as a visual and sensory response to the poem “YOUR IMAGES ARRIVE v14 (Villanelle for Amaia Salazar)” by artist and poet Dr Justin Coombes, created within the framework of the workshop “Artists in Dialogue: Between the Invisible and Visible”, held at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in November 2024.
The project explores the territory where language becomes image, and image dissolves into language. Each fragment, each moment shown, is accompanied by a text that does not seek to describe but to evoke — to open up the possibility of imagining beyond what is visible. The work invites the viewer to experience the synaesthesia between both worlds: how words can be depicted, and how images can speak with the rhythm of a verse.
At its core, this piece celebrates collaboration as a form of expanded creation. Between artists, between friends, between different languages, an invisible yet tangible space emerges; a shared zone where ideas float, intersect, and transform. It is in this in-between space that the fantastic appears, where the invisible becomes perceptible through shared intuition.
Paints in the Imagination with Words does not aim to illustrate a poem nor translate an image: it proposes a dialogue. In this exchange, art becomes conversation, and conversation becomes the work itself.
YOUR IMAGES ARRIVE v14
Villanelle for Amaia Salazar
by Justin Coombes
I close my eyes; your images arrive.
An incubus beside a bride who sleeps.
Each night contains each day's disguised surprise.
You map autism: make a new archive.
Your colleagues' data form a nice, neat heap.
Their images arrive; you close your eyes.
Your detective namesake, like you, contrives
to scratch and dig for secrets each mind keeps.
Each case unearths a fresh, guilty surprise.
Curse-blessings of Charles Bonnet syndrome give
a hallucinatory, waking sweep.
Subjects open their eyes; pictures arrive;
half -memories; half-formed jokes survive.
We are awake, asleep, awake, asleep,
dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Alive.
Trust your power, my friend. Breathe deep. Survive.
Scientist, artist, teacher... do you sleep?
I close my eyes; your images arrive.
Your art arrives, like a disguised surprise.