The days still have twenty-four hours, but their measure no longer seems sufficient. In a time dominated by haste and superficiality, the painting of Carlos Tárdez (Madrid, 1976) asserts the value of slowness, contemplation, and pause as exercises of resistance. The precise moment refers not only to the depicted instant, but to the very act of looking—a conscious exercise that demands a kind of disobedience in the face of the continuous flow of stimuli.

Tárdez proposes a reeducation of time. His images, realistic in appearance, do not seek formal exactness but emotional resonance, the point at which observation becomes thought. His works are not closed narratives, but triggers of memory. They do not tell a story; they summon its possible versions.

Artistic practice, in this context, reveals itself as an act of lucid resistance, and at the same time an exercise that seems useless, yet is essential precisely for that reason. In times when usefulness is the measure of all things, art claims its uselessness as a refuge of the human.

His characters—adolescents caught in gestures that still belong to childhood—embody that transition between worlds, the moment when innocence gives way to awareness, when play begins to blend with responsibility, and the gaze becomes more reflective. In them persists the desire to hold on to what is lost, to keep alive a way of relating to the world based on curiosity and primary emotion. Without a doubt, growing up is nothing more than learning to look anew.

Each work by Carlos Tárdez measures time differently, not in minutes or days, but in intensity, in the mark left by experience when it is observed calmly. His painting reminds us that it is still possible to stop, to observe without guilt, to let thought rest upon the visible. And it may be that such a simple gesture is today the most radical form of freedom.

José Luis Pérez Pont

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