On the Road

Jack Kerouac

In her series based on On the Road, Marta Ibarrondo revisits the mythos of postwar America through the lens of personal migration and retrospective longing. Originally inspired by Kerouac’s frenetic ode to freedom, a book that propelled her toward the United States, Ibarrondo now returns to it with the perspective of a three-decade resident. The youthful exuberance and boundless possibility once promised by the open road are now tempered by a sense of cultural entropy and disillusionment.
‍
Using mid-century road maps and jazz records from 1947 to 1957, the era of Kerouac’s own journey, she reconstructs a visual geography of the novel. Each state is paired with distilled quotations, forming a fragmented, lyrical itinerary. Her red, white, and blue palette evokes both national iconography and ideological tension, while gestural layers of paint mimic the improvisational rhythm of bebop and the stream-of-consciousness prose that defined the Beat Generation. The resulting compositions function as weathered billboards, monuments to a dream in flux.