Saul Josâf, born in 1995 and based in Mexico City, studied BA Social Anthropology at The National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico. Through his oil paintings, he reflects a deep engagement with the emotional and symbolic of both personal and collective experiences. Josaf recently presented his first solo show for König Galerie at Salón Acme (2025).

Saúl Josaf is an architect of memory and dreams. His work explores the fluid boundaries between space, memory and perception, creating oil paintings that function as thresholds between reality and imagination. Rooted in a dream-like language, his paintings reflect on the elusive forces that shape both personal and collective experience. Through interiors devoid of comprehensible narratives and human figures that melt into their surroundings, Josaf constructs spaces where the viewer’s gaze becomes the protagonist.

His practice is guided by an interest in how spaces hold the traces of past events, both the seen and unseen, the visible and unrepresentable. He uses the theme of the window as a site of both separation and access. „Tablero de olvido y lágrimas (Board of Forgetting and Tears)“ turns the window into a barrier, not only of glass and wood but of memory and absence. We are held at a distance. The hand, caught mid-motion, suggests something unfinished, an act interrupted or lost. There is no clear narrative, only remnants – stains of colour, faint gestures, a reflection that distorts as much as it reveals.

Within Josaf’s work, interiors become not just physical structures but psychological spaces where light, colour and atmosphere shape perception. The absence of human presence is not a void but an invitation to interpret these traces. His approach to colour is one of tension and release, a process of structural non-linearity beginning with muted greys and building toward vivid luminosity. The composition resists certainty, blue bleeds into green whilst flesh tones fade into the grain of the frame.

Both informed and supported by Josaf’s background in anthropology, his work interrogates the ways domestic spaces are coded with politics – imposing architectural and objectual limits, dictating movement, preserving memory. He approaches painting as a form of inquiry, resisting fixed narratives and embracing the dynamism of crisis. As Gilles Deleuze, an important influence on the artist, suggests, to produce a work of art is to create a sensation, one that lingers beyond the image itself.

Albie Fay