The Forest welcomes visitors with a kiss. As you walk between the trees they seem to draw closer together, touch and throw you a kiss. The Forest is a magical place where images appear and disappear, where the artist surprises you again and again, where the trees talk to each other and urge you to search them as they pose questions and reveal their answers.

One of the most attractive, best known figures in the Forest is Naiel's Rainbow, which is named after one of Ibarrola's grandchildren.

"My mother tells me that she used to walk up to the hill when she was preganent with me, at the time when Granddad started painting the forest"

, says Naiel Ibarrola. It is a powerful, heartfelt vision of a rainbow glimpsed through the trees in the forest after a shower.

In this work Ibarrola deconstructs a rainbow on three trees, reducing it to its most basic elements. He uses black to highlight the brightness of the colours of the rainbow.

Painting on a backdrop such as the forest, with trees on different planes, was a real challenge that forced Ibarrola to rethink his ideas on dimensions and perspective.

One stormy day a bolt of lightning struck the forest and Ibarrola painted its bright, zigzag course trapped among the trees. In his own words.

“The lightning bolt and the rainbow came out to play & paint with me in the forest”

Ibarrola picked the upper reaches of the forest for his homage to Team 57, the group of artists to which he belonged together with Jorge Duarte, Juan Serrano, Jorge Oteiza and Néstor Basterretxea, whose goal was to bring art closer to the public. To do this, they used bright, contrasting colours that represented all the variety of people, languages, types and customs found in society.

In this work the yellow strokes help to build up and enhance our understanding of the vertical nature of the tree trunk. They run vertically up the tree from the ground, grow and expand upwards at different angles.

One day Ibarrola's attention was drawn to the sound of a group of motorcyclists who came to see his work. He was inspired to paint this curious figure by these visitors who, like his own son, rode up to the forest on motorcycles.

This work represents the evolution of humanity as seen by Ibarrola. Some of the figures start in the depths of the forest as plain vertical lines, but as you move forward they become walkers climbing the hillside. They represent men and women denouncing social issues, people from factories and demonstrations. But they are also the men and women of the past, those who lived in the Santimamiñe caves. They walk slowly in single file and once they are released from their burdens they become children again. You can see them playing among the trees. On the other side Basajaun, the guardian spirit of the forest, looks on.

The red giant looms suddenly from between the trees that make up the March of Humanity, towering over the sloping ground with a power that draws your gaze. Could this red giant be Ibarrola himself, giving us a knowing wink?

At this point in the Forest, the past and present meet. The discovery of cave paintings in Santimamiñe so impressed Ibarrola that he decided to depict the eyes of those first artists who lived in the forest.

In his own words

“the eyes of nature, the eyes of the past and the eyes of the present look on just as you do. Life has more eyes than I do, even if I move around and gaze at it from multiple points of view.”

This work is a little homage to the reductionist geometrical figures of abstract painter Kazimir Malévich, who produced such controversial works (for his time) as White on White and Black Square.

This incomplete circle challenges visitors, creating an optical illusion in which Ibarrola again plays with perspective. On the living backdrop provided by the trees, figures come to life and what looks like a simple circle becomes a hollow that draws you into the depths of the forest. .

Ibarrola created this composition out of his admiration for El Greco, inspired by the colour tests still visible on the edges of the latter's paintings.

Ibarrola also found room among the trees for the animals that he saw when he went up to the forest to paint. In the most magical part of the forest, you can now see 16 animals that he painted as his work progressed.

The Flame represents the heat, light and protection offered by fire in the caves of our ancestors. Ibarrola depicted this powerful idea on five trees charged with keeping the fire alight.

White Undulation was originally part of The Flame, but it later came to be seen as a separate work in its own right. Both White Undulation and The Flame grow up from the ground and rise into the heights of the forest.

This work is a study in how to draw straight lines on a curved surface. Ibarrola saw this as an important piece, because it sparked many thoughts in him that he later put into practice elsewhere in the forest.

Ibarrola brought techniques from Pointillism into his work, as he did also with other art movements such as Impressionism and Cubism. He painted tiny dots of colour filled with light that expand skywards from the floor.

This is one of Ibarrola's boldest pieces. On five trees, he created the effect of light that seems both to emanate from and converge on their centre. His use of bright colours such as violet and green enhances this sensation.

The blend of negative and positive gives rise to a number of different combinations in this thought-provoking play of vertical and horizontal brush strokes with curved and straight lines in orange, violet, blue and green.

As an aid to understanding this piece, it is worth remembering Ibarrola's words about the nuclear issue:

“Between the trees you can see Gernika, and Picasso's painting named after the town reminds me of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, militarism and the menacing nuclear world, so that I throw up my hands and cry 'Enough!'".

Semi-circles scattered across the trees invite visitors to link them together or separate them as they walk by, in an open dialogue between the artworks and their beholders.

Ibarrola's interpretation of the Mosque of Cordoba stretches across 22 trees. Their trunks become columns that intertwine to give the appearance of delicate, high arches.

Blue, green and purple stripes link up and become rhythms that seek to express as much as possible with the minimum number of elements. This piece can be seen in term of the Minimal Art movement, which is characterised by its use of pure colours and basic geometrical shapes.

Once again, a white line painted across the trees upsets the idea of horizontality and turns into a rising diagonal that cuts precisely across the landscape.

This piece is painted on a single tree. Its location in the forest makes it the final expression of the many, closely-knit coloured circles.

Ibarrola's original experimentation in the forest gave rise to a new interpretation of the visual effect of curved lines painted on the actual curved surface of a tree trunk.

The conceptual and visual interplay between the positive and negative sides of a painting is also reflected among the trees. Can a form be positive and negative at the same time?

This piece is also known as "Flourish by Mariluz" after Ibarrola's wife, who helped paint some of the artworks. It is a simple, sincere expression of his thanks to her for her involvement.

This is an enigmatic piece, as it is not known who the message is for. It could be a greeting or a farewell to his family, to visitors or to the forest itself.

This artistic ensemble is in the process of being painted.

This artistic ensemble is in the process of being painted.