Eneko Fraile-Ugalde was born in Renteria, near San Sebastian, in 1968. Ever since he was a young child, the artist-to-be had an irrepressible attraction to the arts; plastic arts, music and literature forming his three main axes. Immediately gifted in naturalistic reproduction, the 10-year-old Fraile prided himself in producing ‘recognisable’ portraits, demonstrating this with his first subject — his father. Naturally, when time came to choose an academic discipline, Fraile opted for fine arts, training at the Pais Vasco University from 1986 to 1989. The artist cut his training short with a sabbatical, during which he spent a year in Brazilian wilderness, ironically cut off from all artistic outlets. Upon returning to the European continent via Paris, he picked up a book on artistic restorations which, after a year of isolation, struck the painter as a revelation. He pursued it through academic training at the University of Granada where he specialised in painting restoration from 1991 to1993, before a scholarship took him to Kyiv to study the restoration of orthodox iconographic imagery. Now fully invested in this technical craft and passion, he went to the University of Northumbria from 1998 to 2000 to further specialise in the restoration of the paper medium and material.
Rich with this in-depth technical know-how, Fraile found work with some of the most celebrated institutions of the English capital, such as the Tate. Although restoration had overtaken creation by this point as Fraile’s primary craft, a friend asked him to create a portrait of her family. After years of conceptual creation (in a post-dictatorship Spain) and restoration, holding a brush had become a rare thing for Fraile. Yet, as soon as the brush touched the canvas, the image came to life, shaped by the technical knowledge he had accumulated through his professional career. Colours were pigments contextualised in history, techniques and methods were rooted in specific epochs and movements. The resulting painting was submitted to and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Word of mouth proved an effective professional strategy in a city and country steeped in the tradition of portraiture. From politicians to the military and the bourgeoisie, commissions became regular occurrences for Fraile. He found himself in Brussels, where a similar networking approach quickly fell into place. His first high-profile commission in the Belgian capital was Herman de Croo. Federal senate Presidents are traditionally captured through portraiture, but the politician was struggling to find an artistic match. With nothing to lose, the restorer-turned-portraitist wrote to the politician, suggesting a visit to his workshop. From that point on, doors were flung open in the political spheres of Brussels, leading to Fraile’s ongoing collaboration with the European Parliament.
Technically, Fraile offers a humble definition of portraiture and resemblance; he describes it as narrating the story of how light falls onto any subject. His artistic intervention, how he captures this story, is in the care and attention he dedicates to his subject. Be it with a live sitter, a composite creation of hundreds of photographs or a single visual source, Fraile invests copious time and energy into understanding who he is representing. Therein lies the true homage to his art. Technical aspects aside, it is through the eyes – the crux of our perceptive senses – that the portraitist captures the soul of his model. Around it, elements blur in and out of focus as Fraile applies his own subjectivity to underline an unsuspected naturalistic magic of painterly verisimilitude. Using oils, historical pigments, carnation tones and shading, the painter applies an infinite number of invisible signatures over the uncanny depictions, from the shadow of a hairline to the texture or colour of the knot of a tie.
