We often want answers
Often there are no answers
Permanent competence
Paradoxes and conflicts shape our lives
The need for success has become normalized
Living is a success
Is living without privileges a success?
Can living with few privileges be a success?
Without any privilege one exists
We live under patterns that are governed by a desire for prominence
Everything, I already knew? or I thought I already knew
Context helps to understand paradoxes and contradictions
Images, generated through drawing and painting, rather than mere market objects, contain a reflection that also wants to be a positive expression of the natural and spontaneous processes, which arose as revulsive in the face of the tensions, depressions and restlessness, to which the human being is subjected globally and in the current context.
Paintings that capture the geometric patterns of nature and from abstraction create a speculative and ambiguous visual ensemble. This project, started in 2021, aims to be a metaphorical and graphic representation that reflects on a latent problem in many areas of our current society.
Each drawing and each painting can be understood as partial details of a more extensive, complex and unknown image, with a scale difficult to measure by its magnitude.
Maybe now we are just beginning to imagine it.
"People, ideas, creations and subjects, which paradoxically show two or more facets often opposed."
As in ancient times, we continue to use images and signs to reveal an always partial and subjective reality. The painting, as a vehicle for transmitting ideas, far from being an expired and sterile medium, can continue to offer interesting samples of its evocative, creative force and a power of intense and subtle suggestion. This project wants to be a reflection of the precarious balance between good and evil that arises within each competing force, to reach and maintain its hegemonic dominance over time. To place it in the current context, I try to represent images that metaphorically show the paradox about the goodness and evils product of any creative activity carried out by humans, and how every society ends up enjoying or suffering to a greater or lesser degree, its results and effects.
Images related to the CO2 VS CO2 exhibition project in the port of Tarragona in 2018, and started in 2016.
There are linear structures with more continuity, without fragmenting that occupy different spatial fields with their intricate paths, before undoing in signs that recover the gestures and repetition contained in the lines of the initial set.
On the other hand, these sinuous and intricate forms that can fleetingly result from gaseous carbon, I imagine them in the internal changes that occur in the seeds, when they are exposed to the delicate and complex process of their genetic manipulation.
A pictorial project carried out in 2017, formally explores the idea of translation, the act that moves us, It moves us and ventures us for new or known paths, and it is also a metaphorical process of the transformation of our thinking, through three concepts: Map - Milestone - Beacon.
Through painting I translate, explore and adapt their meanings, and they serve as a plot thread, to recreate a series of paths, lines and paths that are modulated and amalgamated, with a variety of monochrome tones in each picture.
One of the poles of the project plays with the idea of repetition, strongly linked to nature and ours everyday Geometric abstractions recreate possible symmetries, and act with textures as connections in the form of rhizome, while gradually defining the other pictorial pole of the project, with a more speculative position, related to the difference and singularity that it is Own in each image.
Map - Milestone - Beacon, the three concepts recreate and want to show metaphorically, their own scenarios of the changing human thought. A pictorial project orbiting around universal questions, from a completely subjective and local point of view, in an attempt to work the painting with elements relevant image of the current debates, through the image. Evocative landscapes trapped in the two dimensions, they end up being a more cultural construction, a manifestation of the visual language and here, a renewed invitation to enjoy painting.
CO2 VS CO2 is a set of drawings and paintings made during the year 2016 that take as a reference the imbalance and the difference between natural CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions derived from the action of humans.
I evocate current images related to current issues. The plastic and iconic signifiers that I use, serve to establish a specific visual route. Only the title of each work serves as a nexus and referent, of which they want to represent the different abstract models. The images emphasize some of these imbalances and alterations, is a look that feeds on the formal concepts of the phenomenon and speculates metaphorically on the same idea, to become a visual set that wants to operate in the field of the symbolic.
Through abstraction and through the attributes of painting such as color, composition and drawing, I perform pictorial spaces where structures and graphic paths that emphasize the repetitions of shapes, strokes and chromatic ranges present in nature.
© Carles Castellvi 2026