Agustín Pontesta (San Sebastián, 1963) stands out for his intense path in both his life and his artistic career. From an early age, the need to express himself through painting woke up inside him, but it was thanks to the artist Alfredo Bikondoa that he discovered his true path. Since then he has not stopped working and evolving in parallel to a particular and genuine way of understanding the world and his surroundings.
At the same time he discovered and became interested in Zen Buddhism and its philosophy. For years he attended seminars and intensive retreats. He also got to know Tibetan Buddhism through various lamas, attending and participating in courses and retreats. Attended conventions taught by the Dalai Lama himself, traveling to France, India... During this time he studied and practiced oriental art, Sumi-e, Japanese calligraphy.
He lived for a time in London, motivated by Victorian painting, especially the work of the painter William Turner. In San Sebastian he was a teacher of drawing and painting.
A lover of open spaces and remote places, a keen reader of books by travellers and classic explorers since childhood, Agustín fulfilled his dreams by traveling for several months and up to a year, always alone and with a one-way ticket, making up his itinerary as he went along, has been in remote parts of the planet such as the Amazon rainforest, the Andes, deserts such as the Atacama in Chile, the Thar in India, Turkey, Jordan or Israel, the great expanses of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, the Himalayas (base camps of Everest, of the Annapurna...)... He has made the Camino de Santiago several times in almost all the variants known in Spain in an integral and uninterrupted way, one of them walking for two months back and forth.
Agustín Pontesta is a person with concerns who has adopted alternative methods, faced with a conventional social system. Undoubtedly, this life path, this introspective look which, at the same time, is open to the world, somehow reinforces and permeates his artistic work, appreciating the interiorization of landscapes bathed in a latent spirituality.
Its infinite landscapes, where the horizons seem absent or blurred with an undefined sky, masses of people who are confused by a difficult and extreme terrain. Some of his works sometimes seem to have apocalyptic airs, at other times the textures and reliefs insinuate rocks which make one think of seabeds. Private universes. Art and science are allied.
His biography is full of prizes from various contests and competitions throughout Spain.