After studying Fine Arts in Seville and Barcelona he completed his studies in Columbia University, New York, where he moved in 1986. This city marked his creative and professional development as a painter throughout the next two decades. After a period of research confronting the elements of painting in terms of irreducible facts, colour and light became the main elements of his work.

In the early 1990s he started to photograph in the microscope cross sections of his old paintings. The intensity, concreteness and material truth he found through those photographs revealed the contrast and the correlation between simple, raw materials and the more inscrutable and transcendent nature of painting. Based on that information, he developed techniques to build massive colours from chromatic ideas that offered the possibility of being unweaved and later reassembled as an illusionistic surface.

The relationship between surface and depth plays a key role in his works, while colour - mediated by the transit of light through thin paint layers - becomes a unique perceptual experience. This merging of translucent layers shapes the incoming light while still allowing the eye to traverse them through to the white canvas. The fluctuation of distance between the moving eye and the particular layering in a specific part of the painting makes it impossible to locate the colour. His paintings are transparent and candid. However, despite offering rich surfaces full of radiating colours and deep space, they also hide any trace of gesture, revealing the process followed and suggesting something beyond painting.

Irazabal's paintings are defined by extreme luminosity and strong emotions as a result of complex colours that escape from narration and symbolism. They keep an ongoing challenge to unite the certainty of materiality with the unreliable nature of perception in order to synthesize image, materiality and meaning in an everlasting attempt to paint things that cannot be painted. 

Following his first exhibitions in Spain during the eighties, his work has had a strong presence both in the United States and in Europe. Some of his most relevant solo shows take place in Los Angeles (Koplin 1990, 1992); New York (White Columns, 1995, Jack Shainman Gallery, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2004); San Francisco (Stephen Wirtz, 1999, 2002); Berlin (Spielhouse Morrison, 2003, 2007); Stockholm (Andréhn Schiptjenko, 1997, 2002); Munich (Six Friedrich Lisa Ungar, 2006) and those held in Spain at Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, 1994); Palacio de los Condes de Gabia (Granada, 2002); Artium Museoa, (Vitoria–Gasteiz, 2005). In 2011, he was commissioned a painting for the church of Iesú in San Sebastian, designed by architect Rafael Moneo. In 2024, he presented Contradistancia at MUSAC, León, a solo exhibiton that showcased his work from the 1990s to the present. Since 2004 his works have regularly been shown at Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid (2004, 2009, 2013, 2016, 2022), Galería Artnueve in Murcia (2001, 2014) and Galería Pelaires in Palma de Mallorca (2017, 2020, 2024). He has participated in the exhibitions Art and Space, The Line of Wit, and Material Life at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017, 2021 and 2022).

His works can be found in public collections such as Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao; Artium Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Gobierno Vasco; Banco de España, Madrid; Fundación Banco de Sabadell, Madrid; CA2M, Comunidad de Madrid; Museo de Navarra, Pamplona; Centro de Arte Caja Burgos; Fundación Per Amor a L'Art, Valencia.