Galería Espiral, a veteran of the Art Madrid fair, proposes in this edition, a trip to the creative universes of four artists that represent in their artwork different discursive lines, but all with a clear tendency towards the purest abstraction. A common element in the work of these artists (all from the same generation) is their personal search, an imperative need that distances them from the common. They are: Nacho Angulo, José Carlos Balanza, Luis Medina and Eduardo Vega de Seoane. Artists who make us see.

The artists of Madrid Nacho Angulo and Eduardo Vega de Seoane have been present in almost all the exhibition proposals of Galería Espiral for Art Madrid. In this way, we have been able to see the evolution in the creative language of both over the years, culminating in solid creations in which the questions remain. The multidisciplinary artist José Carlos Balanza has a long artistic career. For his part, the artist, formerly an industrial engineer, Luis Medina, has participated in numerous individual exhibitions in Spain.

José Carlos Balanza

E281119, 2019

Baldosa, Acero, Pintura y Hierro

20 x 73cm

Luis Medina

Space 7, 2019

Acrylic on canvas

50 x 50cm

Nacho Angulo (Madrid, 1950), trained as a painter with Martín Sáez, a friend of his father, who later studied architecture with Arturo Pardos at an academy where some of the best known artists of his generation passed through.

Angulo uses wood as a main component, creating his own language. From this organic material, he plays with textures and distribution in space.

"His paintings are constructed by layers, by times, handling rhythms of his passion for music, dark silences and vivid colours of rhizomes, "time and space", of his admired Deleuze. "To be carpintor", as he has named himself in so many occasions, leads us to think of someone who builds his paintings with wood, neither beautiful nor elegant wood, but wood from industry, from the work, from our hurried and recycled time..." (this is how Luis Martos defines the artist in a recent catalogue).

Nacho Angulo

La rueda roja, 2013

Técnica Mixta sobre madera

100 x 100cm

The sculptor José Carlos Balanza (Logroño, 1958), has extensive experience in individual and group exhibitions. His pieces are part of important collections such as the Würth Museum in La Rioja, the Margarita Montferrato Foundation in Balaguer or the Antonio Saura Foundation in Cuenca.

Balanza is based on conceptual approaches revealed in sculpture, mainly in iron, where the time of the welding bow itself becomes the pencil and brush that give testimony of his own life. In his latest works, he moves away from iron, opening up to new materials: industrial ceramics, screws and a kind of rubber-paint with a metal mesh structure, as a material with a strange appearance and peculiar flexibility by means of which he achieves that special expressiveness, creating partial objects, flyers on black ceramic spaces, dark kitchen and infinite cosmos.

"The resulting object as the beginning and end of the sum of all that makes up the distance, which is defined by the drawing of my life, by the sum of each and every one of the structures that have been necessary to walk on them, with all that I am in order to arrive."

Eduardo Vega de Seoane

En el jardín, 2019

Acrílico, Óleo y Collage sobre lienzo

130 x 97cm

Luis Medina (Santander, 1955), premiered in Art Madrid with Espiral Gallery. Medina's artistic personality is more formalistic and normative than that of his booth colleagues. His education is more technical, coming from industrial engineering, but his abstraction is not rigorous but experimental, widely colourful, playing a kind and almost musical side of the geometric field.

The colour is a fundamental element in the work of the artist from Santander, through chromatic games, Luis Medina expresses and creates a minimalist perspective. Always looking for a balance in the composition; sometimes the line, the planes, the geometry in sum, appropriates his expressive discourse. Sometimes he approaches the lyrical abstraction where the pure feeling of colour can overcome everything.

Luis Medina

NG8, 2019

Acrílico papel

102 x 76cm

The exhibition proposal of the Cantabrian gallery is completed with the artist Eduardo Vega de Seoane (Madrid, 1955), who has a consolidated career as a painter both in Spain and in Europe, mainly in Germany, where he exhibits frequently and enjoys well-deserved recognition. His extensive artistic career has led him to participate in important international fairs in Zurich, Chicago, Washington, Germany, Holland and Belgium.

Vega de Seoane's artwork oscillates between abstract expressionism and neo-informalism, although he avoids definition. In his work we can see a hidden geometry that keeps every moment in its place. In his paintings he lives the rhythm. "I like the fact that we do not know what will happen next, as in nature one lives the landscape from life to death by itself ."

Alexander Grahovsky

CONVERSATIONS WITH MARISOL SALANOVA. INTERVIEW PROGRAM. ART MADRID’25

Alexander Grahovsky (Alicante, 1980) begins with a chaotic or random process, similar to collecting images and creating collages from scenes that capture his interest, which he can then recreate as he pleases. His works explore themes such as the unknown, death, and animals, often drawing parallels with toys and incorporating recurring characters along with elements like floating stones. Narrative plays a crucial role in his paintings; the surrealist aspect emerges from the way he constructs a non-linear story. Scenes overlap, appear in different phases across various sections of each painting, and invite the viewer’s eye to roam through the composition. His work contains references to classical painting and cinema, making its interpretation dependent on the viewer's personal background and emotional state. The central thread of his art conveys that, despite life’s hardships, we all continue to celebrate in some way.

The Lighthouse at the End of the Ocean. 2024. Mixed media. 190 x 140 cm.

What role does experimentation play in your creative process?

Experimentation plays a fundamental role in my entire creative process on two levels: technical and narrative. On a technical level, because I allow myself a range of liberties or aesthetic whims that turn the act of painting itself into a game—something enjoyable where, in a way, anything is possible. On a narrative level, it’s about how I build stories, as there is no script or main idea holding everything together. Instead, starting from a series of seemingly disconnected scenes, I try to construct a story that intertwines, compelling the viewer, in some sense, to contribute their own interpretation or create their own narrative.

What are your references?

My influences range from classical painting, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch or The Ghent Altarpiece, to more contemporary artists like Hurvin Anderson and Dominique Fung, including Hopper, Hockney, and Leonora Carrington, among countless others. All these artistic influences blend with others from cinema, including the films of Parajanov and the director of Midsommar. Particularly, Midsommar has been quite influential in my work for its distinctive aesthetic. Additionally, the world of comics plays a role, particularly the work of Moebius, especially his more surrealist science fiction illustrations. Video games are another source of inspiration, especially in how scenes are depicted—everything is flattened, as if it were a screen or the backdrop of a theater stage, reminiscent of mid-to-late-90s graphic adventure games.

A Brief Story of an Embrace. 2024. Oil, spray paint, colored pencils, and oil pastels. 33 x 41 cm.

How do you create the distinct—and sometimes recurring—characters in your paintings?

The characters develop as the body of work evolves, as if each painting were part of a larger story yet to be told. As I began working in this style, I noticed that many of them reappeared, and when I reused them or made them part of new pieces, I was already considering what I had previously painted about them, as well as what had happened to them in other works. For example, Death has transformed from being a skeleton that might seem to bring bad news into a somewhat mocking or humorous figure wearing a party hat. We also find the Devil, the Magician, and the Red House, which serves as a refuge or a pilgrimage site where characters often end up—or could end up. Then there’s the Black Cat, which initially appeared simply as a warning symbol, as if telling the other characters to stay alert to what’s happening around them, but later became a kind of measure of time: in larger pieces, it typically appears three times. I enjoy playing with the ambiguity of whether it’s three different cats or the same cat appearing at three different points in the story. In this way, the characters help weave a narrative and create connections between all the pieces, forming a shared universe to which they all belong.

The Crow, the Stag, the Grapes, and the Wine I Spilled. 2024. Oil, spray paint, colored pencils, and oil pastels. 60 x 74 cm.

When did you transition to the garden series, and why?

In 2022, I decided to gather all the surreal scenes and sketches that were scattered around my studio and explore what would happen if they coexisted in the same space—what would happen if all these seemingly disconnected elements were placed on the same plane. In this case, the plane is the canvas, and the setting is the garden. It’s here that the garden, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and all the imagery rooted in our collective unconscious become visible. From that point, I chose to keep pulling the thread of this story to see where it would lead me. This is when all the characters begin to emerge, allowing me to create a space where I can play and find creative freedom that I hadn’t experienced in my previous work.

You Should Break My Heart in January 2024. Oil, spray paint, and colored pencils on canvas. 81 x 100 cm.

What connection does this phase of your work have with your past in the world of comics?

This phase of my work draws a lot from all the years I spent reading comics, from when I was a young child to trying to break into the American comic industry. I was close, so close, but it didn’t materialize. The truth is that, in the end, what interested me more than the drawing itself were the more experimental narratives, like those of John Hankiewicz, Dave McKean, or people of that kind. In that sense, I’m mainly influenced by the way stories are constructed. They are not sequential panels where A leads to B, and B leads to C. Rather, the visual journey through the pieces is like a comic page where you can jump from the first panel to the seventh and then return to the second, and depending on the order you choose, the story will unfold in one way or another. It’s true that, for example, what you often find are different fragments of the same scene: a beginning, a middle, a climax, and a resolution, but they are often surrounded by other scenes that either influence the events in each smaller scene or simply coexist in the same universe. In that sense, I’m also very interested in the idea of a shared universe, right? That all these pieces, this entire body of work, form part of a larger story that seems to want to tell itself, one that still doesn’t know where it’s going but is starting to find its place and path. Like the characters that started simply appearing and now each one has its own backstory.

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