The painting of Juan Olivares (Catarroja, 1973) unfolds in the territory of abstraction as an exercise in observation and resistance. Far from the languages of immediacy, his work defends the slow time of the pictorial process and the need to experiment through matter. In Un pam de llum this research is condensed around one axis: light as an agent of transformation, not as a simple visual effect, but as a symbol of inner clarity and the revelation of the invisible.

The artist approaches painting as a space where layers of color function as strata of experience. Each surface preserves the trace of its construction, the marks of a process that does not seek to hide, but to show itself as an essential part of the result. The manual gesture, the density of the oil, the transparency of the pigment, or the weight of color are elements that do not describe an image, but rather produce an atmosphere, a condition of the visible. In this sense, Olivares’s works do not represent but occur, because his painting refers to nothing other than its own existence.

There is in his work a constant tension between control and surrender. Each stroke seems to waver between the precision of one who knows what he is doing and the surrender of one who allows the matter to decide. This duality endows the pieces with a contained energy, a vibration that turns the static into a perceptive event. Light, in this context, is not a motif but a way of understanding the world, a way of seeing through clarity, even when that clarity sometimes blinds.

In the canvases and papers that make up Un pam de llum, painting manifests itself as a space of transition. Forms dissolve without disappearing entirely, as if color preserved the memory of the gesture that originated it. This intermediate condition, between presence and dissolution, is what gives the work its symbolic depth: painting understood as a territory where certainty fades and seeing becomes experience.

Faced with the noise and overexposure of the present, Olivares proposes a practice sustained in silence and observation. His work does not seek to represent light, but to let light happen. That is the true radicality of his proposal: to remember that even a minimal glow, a span of clarity, is enough for the essential to be revealed. Painting, then, does not question the world; it illuminates it.

José Luis Pérez Pont